Life in Black and White
by Lady Altair
Summary: 1977 is anything but black and white for Hestia Jones, apprentice Juriswitch. The first of the Death Eater trials commences in a world that doesn't yet know the meaning of Lord Voldemort's ascent.
1. Chapter 1

_Life in Black and White_

Chapter One: Woe

* * *

Hestia slumped through the door with all the grace of a sack of potatoes rolling down a steep and bumpy hillside. Dumping her bag by the kitchen table, she collapsed into one of the chairs and growled in some kind of strange combination of relief and frustration.

There was a little noise from the sitting room, and Hestia seized upon it, grateful Sturgis was there to vent to. "Remind me, remind me _please," _she called over to him from the kitchen, "that this apprenticeship is prestigious, and it's only for three more years, and after that I'll be fully certified to practice magical law and will make a lot of money and lead a sweet and easy life."

Sturgis laughed, coming around the corner and catching sight of her, face planted firmly on the tabletop and hands clutched over her head. "Do you want me to mention the attractive male assistant you're going to hire and flagrantly sexually harass? You liked that idea the last time we had this conversation."

"And what an excellent idea it is, so please!" Hestia mumbled, her voice muted by the thick oak planking of their table.

"In just three short years, or approximately seven-hundred-and-sixty working days if you're considering a Monday through Friday workweek adequate, your apprenticeship will be over and you can practice magical law anyway and where and when you choose, as long as the 'way' is Ministry approved, the 'where' is within the Ministry of Magic, and the 'when' is normal working hours, plus an extra fifteen or twenty hours a week three or four times a month. You will earn more money in a week than I will see in three months and will have to hire me to spend it for you in lieu of any free time to do it yourself. And I suppose you can just hire me as your assistant; I won't complain about the sexual harassment. I might even enjoy it." Sturgis leaned down over Hestia and wrapped a hug around her.

"You think you're such a clever boy, don't you?" Hestia grumbled, sitting up as soon as Sturgis unwrapped his arms from around her middle.

"Yes, I do," Sturgis admitted, strolling over to the counter and poking at the kettle with the wand he produced from his shirtsleeve. "I made some pasta," he mentioned, peering over at the pot on the stovetop. "I burned it onto the bottom, but I picked out most of those bits. It's only partially congealed; with a little marinara and a quick heating charm, it shouldn't be half-bad."

"Bah," Hestia waved him off. "That's the one good thing about this job—completely kills my appetite. Not that you don't do a good enough job with your cooking. I haven't been this thin since I was fifteen."

"Let's not get on about the 'one good thing'—you love that job, don't even start. And, for the record, that 'gaunt' look is as attractive as the family," Sturgis snarked, waving a hand when Hestia looked at him strangely. "Snobby high Pureblood humor, viciously attacking some of our 'own'; it's how my aunt always insulted my older sisters when she thought they were too skinny. Don't mind me."

"You English and your society circles. If you hate someone, you've got to do it properly. I'd imagine you have guidelines for it and everything," Hestia shrugged.

Sturgis laughed. "We can't even let go of it when we're dead. If I had to hear about 'Sir Properly-Decapitated Podmore' from Nearly-Headless Nick one more time during school, I think I would've done myself in."

Hestia leaned over to dig through her bag of books. "How was your day? As melodramatically awful as mine? You can do the song and dance if you want, since you listened to me."

"No need, but thanks, I'll keep that offer on file. Same old; paperwork and patrol. Not a bad day, nothing too out of the ordinary. The DMLE had a quiet day today, thank God." Sturgis sounded a little dark, but he quickly turned the subject. "You off tomorrow? Was thinking of doing some shopping—my robes are starting to fray. And Merlin knows what I'll come home with if I go out on my own."

Hestia grimaced. "I'm not off, but I can help you with the robes. I'm at Madame Malkin's tomorrow; it's a Saturday."

Sturgis shook his head. "You're sick, Hestia, why do you do that to yourself? Are sixty hour weeks at the DML not enough that you have to work the weekends as a shop girl in Diagon? Are the clothes _really _worth it?"

Hestia ignored him steadfastly in a manner that seemed subtitled, '_well, of course they are; you just don't understand, you're a poorly dressed man.' _ "I think I'll be able to get in a good two or three hours of dedicated studying tonight," she said brightly, rubbing at the vague but darkening circles under her eyes.

Sturgis rolled his eyes. "Or you could put your books away, sit back and go to bed at a reasonable hour, but then I suppose that's asking too little of you."

"I can't—they're bringing all the apprentices onto the Selwyn case on Monday, there's such a huge workload!" She sounded excited, as though she'd just said they'd been given a 50 pay raise and extended lunch hours. "I'm sure that means absolutely no free time, so I'm going to do as much this weekend as I can. And I don't even have to be in to Malkin's until eleven," Hestia continued on, as though this late starting hour was an unimaginable treat. "I can study until midnight and then get eight hours of sleep—"

"Like a normal person," Sturgis muttered, digging out a teabag from the box in the cupboard.

"—and still get up to have an hour or two to get ready after I wake up," she finished with a relish of satisfaction. She looked back up at Sturgis, who was regarding her as an oddity. "What?"

"You're cute," he grinned, shaking his head in vague disbelief.

"I'm _determined,"_ Hestia corrected primly, flipping open the thick, dog-eared volume she had in front of her.

"I'll say," Sturgis agreed. "What happened to the good-for-nothing Jones who skived off lesson with me to go climb trees by the lake? I think you're overcorrecting, Hestia, all this dogged, eye-on-the-prize behavior. It's humbling; I'm still pretty useless."

"Eh, you're not useless, Sturgis. You've never been; you just get things done without really trying."

"And you don't?" He quirked up his mouth in affectionate disbelief, and Hestia scowled playfully at him.

"If I had something to throw that wouldn't knock you unconscious, you'd be in trouble! I'd like to be a useful member of society and do something I'm good at, however difficult, but mostly I want to be back at school and do _really_ well without _really_ trying. This…I like it, but I have to actually _try._"

"And what a tragedy that is. You could have kept on with the slacking, you know. You just picked the wrong career track," he informed her, gesturing to the pile of books on the table. "Anything that involves any sort of examination after the N.E.W.T level is, in my opinion, the wrong career track. Too much work. When is that, anyway?"

"Six weeks." Hestia's eyes went slightly wide and unfocused, her mouth twisting around in some silent moue of vague and as-of-yet not entirely realized panic.

"You'll do all right," Sturgis said stoutly, clapping her on the shoulder and setting the mug of tea down beside her.

"I hope so," Hestia said, still a little frozen in the shadow of impending doom. "They'll chuck me out of my apprenticeship if I fail it; two _years _wasted." Her voice sort of echoed, trailing off after the last word in horror at the possibility.

"I'll still love you, Jones," Sturgis promised her solemnly, his mouth a thin, tightly-held line. Hestia laughed and reached out to swipe at him. He dodged it easily and grinned back at her.

"Well, good! Because I'm sure my mum and dad won't. God help me!" She shook her head. "But it's no use to be thinking like that. With the work and effort I intend to put into studying, I might be able to pass for a diligent Hufflepuff. I should do quite well enough."

"No doubt," Sturgis said with no small amount of conviction. He stifled a yawn, looking over at the clock. "Well, I'm going to go to bed. I'll leave you to your determination and legal books."

"Early night, for a Friday and you," Hestia observed, looking over at the clock, which only read nine pm. "Aren't you going out?"

"No." Sturgis looked vaguely disappointed. Any Friday night that didn't involve heavy drinking and loud music in smoky enclosed spaces was, by his accounts, a complete waste of an evening. "Early morning," he informed her. "Hopefully you'll be in bed before I wake up for my patrol."

"Diagon overnight shift again?" Hestia asked, pausing over her book. Sturgis had been taking more of the late-night shifts in the recent weeks—she'd been running into him in the well-lit kitchen where she studied when he was heading out.

Sturgis nodded, looking glum. "Yeah, one to six." Hestia looked suspicious, and opened her mouth to ask why he was taking all these unusual late nights, but he seemed to anticipate her and jumped back in. "But it won't really be so bad, and I'll have all tomorrow and Sunday free! I'll come by the shop in the afternoon, you can truss me up like you please." Hestia looked noticeably more bright-eyed in anticipation.

"Can I show you the new Italian collection? You can use my discount! Please?"

Sturgis looked put-upon. "Maybe, Hestia, but I do need to actually wear these things out, and not cock around with useless frills and tassels."

"Hey, hey! Useless tassels, I don't want to hear it!" Hestia held up the sleeve of her Jurisapprentice robes, which sported two long rope-like tassels that hung off the wrists and all the way to the floor. Sturgis shook his head.

"I think they design those things to get in the way as much as possible," he mused, tugging experimentally on the long grey cord.

"It's _stately _and _traditional," _Hestia corrected with a roll of her eyes, pulling her robe out of his hand. "Which means, 'We had to wear the stupid things when we were apprentices so we'll be damned if you don't, too!' If I pass the exam, they'll shorten them to my knees, so that's something to look forward to."

"Ah, the _we,_ ruining things for everyone," Sturgis sighed. He yawned heavily. "Well, that's it, I'm off to bed. Don't let me find you in here when I get up for patrol."

"Promise," Hestia said staunchly, holding out her hand. Sturgis shook it formally.

"Night, Hestia," he called back over his shoulder. "You'd better be in bed by one."

"Yeah, yeah," Hestia replied vaguely, her attention already glued back into her textbook.

She was not, in fact, in bed by one. Asleep, to be sure, but not in bed. Sturgis found her asleep on top of her book, arms curled under her head as a makeshift pillow.

He carried into her room. Sturgis tended to avoid Hestia's room, preferring the clean, utilitarian neatness that his few possessions afforded his own sleeping area. To say that Hestia's room was neat was an understatement; her clothing hung according to designer in the three mismatched wardrobes, cosmetics and intricate perfume bottles carefully arranged according to height on the vanity that matched one of the wardrobes, shoes neatly arranged beneath and handbags and accessories and books (filed alphabetically) filled the shelves that lined nearly every available inch of wall space. It was a shrine to obsession, neat as a pin. It was just that the small room was packed from the plaster ceiling to thick-carpeted floor, leaving only narrow walkways between bed and bookshelf, wardrobe and narrow window. Despite Hestia's compulsive neatness, the whole room just seemed somehow chaotic in its closeness, an overload of colors and textures with the loud peacock blue satin of her bed hangings as a centerpiece, and there was no room to move or breathe. It was really nothing more than a glorified closet with a bed shoved in as an afterthought.

He deposited her on her bed and, after a moment's consideration of propriety (for all of their ten years of friendship and two years' cohabitation, Hestia was very particular about her modesty) removed only her Apprentice overrobes, lest the stately, traditional tassels strangle her in her sleep. He set her alarm for her, even though he was entirely certain she wouldn't need it; she had a better clock in her head than any run on gears and magic and she'd be awake precisely when she meant to be.

Gideon Prewett was waiting patiently in the corridor right outside the flat. "Sorry," Sturgis apologized, pulling his wand from the pocket in his shirtsleeve. "Had to put my flatmate to bed, she passed out on the kitchen table again."

Gideon shrugged. "No problem. Fabian went out with Moody last night, and he said Mad-Eye had said that it might be quiet for a while, at least until the Selwyn prosecution gets underway…so we're hoping for an uneventful night."

"Aren't we all?" Sturgis grinned, maybe a little grimly as he thought back to the file that sat on top of Hestia's books on the kitchen table labeled 'Selwyn'. "Aren't we all?"

* * *

Posted a few days early, because I just got home from vacation and I'm basking in the glory of a wifi connection that doesn't conk out when I shift my weight. I'm hoping I can keep with a steady update schedule. I'm going to aim for a new chapter every weekend. This is by no means a guarantee. I'm new to this stuff and I don't know how it's all going to pan out. I WILL be finishing. WILL WILL WILL. But updating schedules might not be as clockwork as we'd all like. So please, stick with me, and please please please REVIEW! There's no better way to make me maximize my word documents and keep truckin'!

The title: I completely jacked it from a work-in-progress I abandoned a few years ago, pre-HBP, when I went by another name and mostly haunted the FictionAlley boards. It still fits really well, though, and I'm completely BLOCKED on another one. Yeah, not much happens in this chapter, but it's working up.

And the next chapter of "The Spare Princess" is done, just needs some general editorial proddy and pokery. Which might not get done asap, as 'Breaking Dawn' came out today and I'm going out later to buy it. (sillygirlyglee)


	2. Chapter 2

_Life in Black and White_

Chapter Two

* * *

"_This _is poorly worded." Dorcas Meadowes' voice was sharp, her slender finger jabbed at a passage on the parchment Hestia was bent over.

"I—" Hestia began, but Dorcas jumped back in, shaking her head in obvious disapproval.

"No excuses. Tighten it up; it's a contract, you need to specify. If your wording was any less exact, you'd have a loophole on your hands, an actual _loophole_. _The Science of the Back Door; a Study on the Utilization of Loopholes_, that was on the list, I believe." Hestia opened her mouth to agree (_Yes, the one by Justin Case, _was the politely edited version of an answer she'd prepared, omitting the altogether unnecessary and critically dangerous finish of _you nitpicky, impatient bitch_) but Juriswitch Meadowes continued on. "Have you been keeping up with the reading? If you know what weaknesses and mistakes they're looking to exploit, then you'll know how to strengthen up the bits you need and avoid the pitfalls. Everything needs to be _ironclad_, Miss Jones."

Quiet fury flooded Hestia. Had she been keeping up with the reading,indeed! She'd finished all the books weeks ago! She kept her mouth shut, though; Hestia was smart enough to recognize defeat when it criticized her contracts. _It's just a first draft, I was going to go back and edit it, _Hestia thought mulishly, her mouth twisting up and her brow scrunching as Juriswitch Meadowes moved on to ambush Daniel Abbott, who nearly stabbed himself with his quill when her hand came down to point out some fatal grammatical error that would no doubt let murderous contract-breakers run free to flout legal bureaucracy and kick puppies. _Can't get everything right in one run through, can you?_

Mondays mornings were, in the tradition of Mondays mornings everywhere, hellish. Contracts were finicky, particular things that depended on a hundred thousand minute little details. Even Hestia, who excelled in noticing minute little details, found the subject frustrating and endlessly, painfully intricate.

The clockwork routine of the Monday was especially disappointing today; they'd been expecting something. Despite the excitement over their promised involvement in the Selwyn case, the three apprentices hadn't heard any more about it. They'd all studiously looked over the file they'd been given on Friday (Daniel Abbott was in the hesitant beginning stage of being able to recite the thing—in its verbose yet information-free entirety—on demand, but then he had the enviable gift of photographic memory) but they'd been shunted off into the same back office as always and told to draft up mock contracts much as they did every Monday morning when the Juriswitches and –wizards were too busy with the weekend backup paperwork from the DMLE to be bothered teaching the apprentices.

Alasdair Diggory, whose cousin was a secretary for Juriswizards Dearborn and Henley—the two in charge of the Selwyn case—had told Hestia and Daniel what little he'd managed to find out in at least four separate conversations during the course of the morning, each of which the two listened to with rapt, hopeful attention. And it wasn't anything that wasn't being plastered all over The Daily Prophet, anyway.

Ophion Selwyn was being tried, among a series of other very serious and rather well-substantiated accusations, on charges of belonging to an organization known as the Death Eaters, and the wizarding world was in an uproar. Under the law recently enacted by the Wizengamot under Albus Dumbledore, membership in any organization designated by the court as dangerous, cult-like, or otherwise objectionable—while not grounds for arrest and prosecution on its own, an important stipulation in the law—brought new and greater consequences on those who fell foul of the law. The Selwyn case was the first (_of many_, was whispered ominously in the corridors) Death Eater trial ever brought before the Wizengamot, the first case prosecuted under this new law.

Selwyn was being charged with at least ten counts of non-lethal Unforgivable use, two counts of lethal Unforgivable use, and two counts of murder by unspecified dark magic, in addition to unauthorized Obliviation and tampering with governmental Floo lines.

Or at least that was the deduction of everyone not in the know in the Department of Magical Law, bits of information and gossip gleaned from chatty secretaries and quick glances at parchments that 'slipped out' of files. Nothing had yet been formally announced and everyone was deathly curious. The resulting quilt of charges they'd pieced together was a damning one indeed; if convicted on all charges, Selwyn stood to spend more than ten lifetime sentences in Azkaban.

When Juriswitch Meadowes had finished ripping Alasdair's contract into tiny bits, she excused herself, telling them to rewrite the things and she'd be back before lunch to check them again. The minute the door closed behind her, Alasdair was out of his seat, his face red as the ink that marked up his parchment and the offending document crumpled up in his hand.

"Calm down, Ally," Hestia said wearily, pressing her forehead to her desk. "We know you're brilliant and unappreciated." The facetious tone of her voice did not go unnoticed by Alasdair, who shot her a filthy glance and tightened his hand around the crumpled contract.

"We all really are," Daniel said earnestly, looking morose. "I thought we were going to be able to be helpful today."

Alasdair pulled a face. "We won't be helpful until we pass that exam; they don't trust us now. Every time they look over and think 'oh, might we entrust a tiny bit of responsibility to our fine apprentices', they see _these,"_ he shook his wrist to waggle the grey tassel that hung down to the floor, "and remember that we are, indeed, simple apprentices."

"Well, these 'simple apprentices' better get on these contracts before Meadowes comes back," Hestia suggested, looking around to the other two. Daniel seemed to agree, looking back down at his red-riddled parchment with a sense of inevitability. Alasdair looked mutinous, glaring at the crumbled document in his hand with intense dislike. "Whinging about anything is just going to ensure we never see _anything_ on the Selwyn case, so just do as we're supposed to, Ally," Hestia implored.

He grumbled, but did sit down and when Meadowes arrived an hour later, could not find fault with any of the contracts presented to her.

"She was looking so hard to find something wrong," Alasdair grumbled over his lunch. The three were seated around the Fountain of Magical Brethren in the Atrium of the Ministry, which was noticeably quieter on the lunch hour.

"That's what she's supposed to do," Daniel put in fairly, taking a pensive bite of his roast beef sandwich. "I mean, she's a bit…" Daniel trawled his vocabulary for an objective word, "…abrupt, shall we say, but it _is _what she's there to do for us. Our contracts _were_ a bit loose."

Alasdair snarled, picking the crusts off his own sandwich. "Well, what are we supposed to do? Write a perfect example on one go 'round? I hadn't even _finished,_ much less had a chance to go back through and proofread." Hestia had her mouth too full of lemon crème to do more than nod her enthusiastic agreement. _Too right!_

"Are you eating conjured food again, Hestia?" Alasdair eyed her china plate of lemon pudding suspiciously, turning on her rather unfairly considering she'd just sided with him. Hestia shrugged wordlessly; it seemed a bit pointless to claim she'd packed the elaborate pudding, plate, fork and all, with the single, vaguely withered apple she'd just eaten.

"That's really unhealthy," Daniel put in with some genuine concern. "My mum had a friend who starved herself into hospital like that."

"Eating disorder," Alasdair added acidly, his thin, annoyingly attractive face projecting disapproval but no surprise as he looked Hestia up and down critically. "I thought you looked skinnier." He chucked a wrapped Pumpkin Pasty from his own lunch at her head. "Eat that, you silly vain cow."

Hestia looked mutinous, but Daniel gently put in, "You'll want to have had something, Hestia, it might be a long afternoon." The man had an earnest, kind air about him and it made Hestia snatch the pasty and rip into it with a defiant glare at Alasdair, who looked entirely unconcerned with the turn of events.

"How's your new nephew doing, Alasdair?" Daniel asked politely as the conversation lulled a little awkwardly against the musical notes of the falling water. The younger man visibly swelled with pride.

"Marvellous. He's a lovely little chap, a real Diggory, our little Ced! Amos and Samantha are thrilled, couldn't be happier." Hestia smiled to herself, a little against her will, as she polished off the pasty, trying not to lick her fingers just because she knew Alasdair would notice how hungry she obviously was. There was something about men and their enthusiasm for babies that really was just irresistible, even when the man in question was generally somewhat insufferable.

Hestia shot a grateful glance at Daniel as Alasdair rolled on with the laundry list of accomplishments his three-month-old nephew had to his name, his formerly sour attitude forgotten. Daniel waved her off with a slight shake of his head that said _it's nothing._

Juriswizards Henley and Dearborn were waiting for them in their tiny shared office, looking grand and imposing and too big for the apprentices' woeful little room in their official robes. Henley was holding court at Hestia's desk, looking through a file, while Dearborn held up the wall by Daniel's desk, having a low-voiced conversation with Dorcas Meadowes. The atmosphere among the interns morphed instantly from lunch-hour informality to steel-edged eagerness, and all three stood up a little straighter.

Joshua Henley was an average-looking man in his mid-fifties, edging towards the portly and with a definite hard edge to his look, which was fixed unblinking on the three. Hestia and Daniel cowered slightly under it; Alasdair seemed unimpressed. Caradoc Dearborn, on the other hand…Hestia cringed. He was _handsome. _Juriswizard Dearborn was the respectable, golden kind of good-looking that tied up Hestia's tongue and left her feeling fifteen years old and hugely inadequate. And he, like Daniel, had that kind, patient aura about him that made it ten times worse; not even someone you could write off as an arrogant berk and, horribly, the kind of person who _noticed _exactly how uncomfortable he made you.

Henley wasted no time and addressed them briskly. "The Selwyn case is, as you know, huge and the workload corresponds. You three will be taking on some of that; you'll be assigned to one of us." Hestia froze, already knowing which way the wind was blowing, and knowing her assignation was the best, worst, and only option. Henley barrelled on. "Mr. Diggory, you're with me. Mr. Abbott, Dearborn. Miss Jones, you'll be helping Juriswitch Meadowes."

Dorcas Meadowes smiled tightly at Hestia, and the only positive she could see was that at least she wouldn't be stammering, stumblingly incompetent in Caradoc Dearborn's golden presence.

Meadowes wasn't unkind in any way, Hestia decided as she climbed the steps to her and Sturgis' place in Clapham. It wasn't that she was unpleasant, or rude, or overly demanding—she was just the sort of person for whom such things came easily, and thus couldn't understand Hestia's ignorant missteps, her failure to immediately grasp the concepts and ideas presented to her. And she didn't quite know how to explain all those things that came easily to her, which left both of them quite at a loss.

But there was one thing that Meadowes loved about her—Hestia could _read. _Hestia could read quickly, and could retain the knowledge in just one read through. Meadowes was nowhere near as fast, and thus Hestia came to the task of reading through the old law books with cases that bolstered theirs. It wasn't a bad assignment at all, and Hestia left the Ministry that night feeling deliciously useful. It was something to tell Sturgis, at least.

Selwyn's lawyers, understanding how thoroughly they were boxed in, in terms of the charges being levelled and the sheer amount of damning evidence against him, were instead choosing to fight the new law and the extra weight it added to the sentence. It was prejudicial, unfair, contradictory to the freedoms outlined in _The Rights of the Magical Citizen, _etcetera and so on and so forth_. _They were going down, they knew, but they were going down loud and kicking and without any dignity whatsoever.

Sturgis wasn't at home, which was surprising. He was usually firmly ensconced in the sofa by six o'clock in the evening on any of the weeknights, but the flat was still and quiet. Hestia bypassed the kitchen and headed straight into her bedroom.

Hestia loved her bedroom. It was orderly and warm and familiar, all of her things piled around, the thick, jewel-toned Oriental rugs plush under her bare feet. She carefully placed her shoes back into their place and hung her bag off the hook on the back of the door, leaving the books inside. She'd promised herself a night off from studying, and she was going to have it.

She threw herself down onto her satin duvet, digging her face into the pillows blissfully. Hestia was quite sure she could lay there for the rest of her life.

Five minutes later, though, she was quite ready for something else. Sturgis had failed to return home, so she flipped on the wireless and turned it to a station that broadly advertised its disinterest in the news and current events in between long stretches of music—she was in no mood to hear anything more related to the Selwyn case, and that was sure to be all over the news anywhere she cared to look.

She conjured an ice-cream cone as she browsed her wardrobes, resolving herself to a night of creating new outfit combinations that she'd never have a chance to wear. She licked it thoughtfully, her mind wandering back to lunch. What was wrong with conjured food, anyway? She did a good job, too. Hestia wasn't extraordinarily talented with wandwork (Sturgis had bit his tongue when she'd mentioned that in their fifth year while pondering career options, restraining himself from the obligatory fifteen-year-old-boy, gutter-minded 'So _that's_ why you never have a boyfriend!' for only a minute or so) but she was _damn _good at faking good food—she could feel the fat in the ice cream clinging to the inside of her mouth in the way that only _really_ good ice cream did—and so what if it was actually non-existent? All the better, really; lemon crème puddings and butter-pecan ice cream weren't exactly good for you, and it wasn't as if she just didn't eat.

She was considering how a spring-green waistcoat might look under her apprentice robes when Sturgis thundered in the front door. She was pretty sure, from the footsteps, that that was the end of her quiet night.

* * *

A/N: James is in pieces on the desk next to me, and I'm PRAYING things get sorted. Just thought I'd post this, because I have no idea when I'll be able to get around to another, what with this disaster and my moving back over the weekend. It shouldn't be too terribly long, in any case, but probably not this weekend.


	3. Chapter 3

_Life in Black and White_

Chapter Three

* * *

"Hestia! You home?" he called, already pounding on her bedroom door.

"Yeah, come in!" she yelled back, shoving the end of the ice cream cone into her mouth.

The door popped open and Sturgis' yellow-thatched head poked in. "You eaten yet?" he asked.

Hestia chewed the remains of the ice cream cone, and then shook her head. "No, you have something in mind?"

"Some friends wanted to venture into muggle London for some good Chinese. You interested?"

Hestia was about to throw out an emphatic _yes_—the one takeaway in Diagon was horrendously bad and she hadn't had good Chinese since she'd visited her sister in Cardiff—when the thought struck. "What should I _wear? _I don't have any _muggle _clothes._"_

Sturgis laughed, already heading down the hall back to the door. "What you have on, minus the robes. Nice trousers, respectable shirt and waistcoat—you'll do all right." Hestia looked down, disappointed. All these wardrobes full of pretty things to wear and the first chance she had to go out and wear whatever she wanted, to go out not wearing work clothing…work clothing was the only appropriate garb. Figured.

She grabbed one of the handbags down off the shelf—at least she had an occasion to carry one of those and not her huge work bag. The scarlet leather picked up the tiny red pinstripes running through the grey silk of her waistcoat and perfectly matched the spindly red spike heels hidden under her long grey trousers. "Have you got any muggle money?" she screamed at Sturgis through their sound-killing plaster walls, digging her pocketbook out of her work bag.

"Yeah," he roared back at her.

"Okay!" She tossed the pocketbook filled with galleons and knuts into the handbag anyway, and her wand after it—she might not really need the bag, but she was going to carry it and she preferred not to carry it empty; it felt strange and too light on her shoulder.

She did make a mental note, though; on her next day off, whenever it came, she was changing out some money at Gringotts and going shopping in Muggle London. Somehow, the thought had never occurred to her before. Despite the rather obvious fact that she _lived _in Muggle London, she rarely ventured any farther than the little alleyway behind their place to Apparate to Diagon or the Ministry. The next time Sturgis' friends came around wanting to wander around Muggle London, she was going to have just the outfit for the occasion.

"You'd better be able to keep up in those stupid shoes," Sturgis muttered, casting a filthy glance at her feet. "We're walking."

"I'm fine!" Hestia frowned. Men didn't appreciate anything pretty, did they? "I worked all day in them, why shouldn't I be fine now?"

He shook his head as he locked and warded the door behind them. "Your feet must be deformed, walking around in those all day. Oh, and I put a few more wards on the door, I'll teach you the counters when we get home."

Hestia opened her mouth to defend her feet, but the part that followed drew her attention. "More wards?" she asked, a frown creasing her brow. "What do we need those for? That flat is already warded better than my parents' house, and they're paranoid."

"Just being cautious; I see too much at work," he said, his grin a little forced. Hestia didn't want to push it; and when were more precautions ever a _bad_ thing?

"Okay," she acquiesced. "We meeting Gideon?"

"And Fabian and Maggie…Gideon's younger brother and one of his friends," Sturgis explained, jumping down the steps two at a time like an overgrown kid. Hestia rolled her eyes and primly kept pace behind him, her heels clicking on the concrete with that specific, high-heel sound she _still_ enjoyed a little more than was strictly normal_._

"Girlfriend?" Hestia asked, her voice a play at neutrality. Gideon _was _really good-looking, if something of a stick-in-the-mud who didn't particularly _like _her overmuch; a younger brother sounded promising.

Sturgis laughed at her. "Not Maggie, but Fabian's a useless pursuit."

"Claimed property, eh? Oh, well!" she said lightly, meaning it.

The trio was waiting for them at the corner, the smallest figure waving greetings when they first recognized Sturgis by his thatch-yellow hair and Ministry-appropriate trousers and shirt.

Gideon spared a smile for Hestia and introduced the other two. Fabian was, in terms of pure physical looks, the kind of man Hestia tended to fancy. Sharply defined good looks, smart-looking wire-rimmed spectacles, an easy grin. But then her gaze travelled to his rumpled shirt, the creased pants, the vague touch of casual disarray that cooled her interest substantially. He bid her a friendly 'hello' and expressed a vague familiarity with her name that he couldn't quite place.

Maggie bid her a bright, cheerful hello. If Fabian was casual disarray, the tiny girl beside him was rave chaos. Maggie was the kind of tiny, bird-like thin that, at first glance, Hestia deeply envied and, at second, really didn't. There were dozens of mismatched bangles on each wrist, her plain brown hair was striped with chunks of platinum blonde and vibrant pink, and the black t-shirt she was wearing with jeans had a neon advertisement on it for something called (rather inappropriately, Hestia thought) The Sex Pistols.

Hestia had expected better from the only member of the group who wasn't pureblooded—the outfit seemed to scream—but five minutes after they left the corner behind, it became clear that Maggie's outfit, far from being a stark anomaly, was not that uncommon and certainly not the worst of what Muggle fashion seemed to offer. That didn't stop Hestia from finding the effect offensively ugly, as cute as Maggie might be underneath the mess.

The three men sectioned themselves off in front, walking a bit too fast to be accidental and talking quietly to themselves.

"Boys' club, eh?" Maggie joked, falling in step beside her. Hestia laughed.

"I think it's more of a 'not-Hestia' club, but you have enough manners to not let me walk alone." She cast a playfully mean look at the three back a few steps ahead of them.

Maggie laughed, a snickery sort of bird-trill. "Let's see how far they get before they remember I'm the only one who knows where we're going."

It took them a while, too, the three heads bent together, occasionally taking a random right turn when an intersection met their path. Maggie and Hestia giggled to themselves. Finally, though, when fifteen minutes later none of them seemed any more inclined to look up and realize they didn't know where they were going, Maggie muttered to Hestia, "Well, I suppose I best stop them now before we end up in Wandsworth."

The restaurant was, truthfully, not too terribly far from where they were, a fact that the three men grasped onto with obnoxious fervor.

"Innate sense of direction, us men," Sturgis crowed proudly, attacking his Kung Pao shrimp with awkwardly-held chopsticks. Fabian and Gideon nodded wordlessly, both of their mouths full. Maggie picked around her chow mein with a fork, forgoing the chopsticks all together, shaking her head.

"Yeah, sure," she said scathingly. "Like that Y chromosome, in addition to endowing you with a cock, rolled up a grand map of the universe inside it."

Hestia cringed to herself at the crass language. She didn't quite understand what a 'whycromizone' was—probably something Muggle—and she was reasonably certain, as well, that Sturgis, Fabian, and Gideon didn't know either, but they nodded agreement anyway. "Exactly," Fabian grinned, pointing a plastic fork at Maggie. "Right in one."

Hestia didn't feel quite so out of place during dinner, sitting around the scrubby table with the four of them. She did catch, though, a few sort of censoring looks between the others, always followed by a quickly ended line of conversation and a shiny clean new topic to start on, like they were afraid of saying too much in front of her. There was still definitely an air of the tag-along; though Maggie and Sturgis tried valiantly to include her in everything, Hestia never got far into a sentence without feeling the heavy weight of Gideon's disapproving glare on her. It was more than enough to staple her tongue to the roof of her mouth; she let the others carry most of the conversation, keeping most of her opinions to herself and her mouth closed.

Gideon did not like her. It was an almost novel experience for Hestia, to be disliked in such a way. Most people she knew liked her well enough, or were polite enough to act like they did. Gideon didn't. Didn't like her, didn't pretend to. Hestia'd got it out of Sturgis when he came home from the pubs one night off his face that Gideon found her too brash, too friendly, too loud, too shallow… 'a vain waste of a fine mind' Sturgis had helpfully quoted for her as she put him to bed, though more poorly enunciated.

Hestia tried to dislike him back, but she rather found she couldn't. There was nothing particular about him to dislike except his disregard for her--she would have liked him if he'd liked her, certainly, and since when was it a crime to dislike someone? He was never anything less than polite to her--he just had absolutely no time or patience for anything to do with her.

It was enough to feel included in the conversation, even though she chose to sideline herself for most of it. It felt normal, a nice departure from her usual evening of solitude and study and Sturgis.

And then, out of nowhere and looking entirely wrong in the context of the dingy, empty muggle restaurant on an unremarkable side street in muggle Clapham, a small silver gazelle cantered through the wall and, to Hestia's dumbfounded surprise, started speaking in Juriswitch Meadowes' voice. She was strangely certain for half a moment that she was experiencing the latent effects of some stress-related breakdown, a few hours after the fact, until she noticed that the rest of them had gone silent as well, all attention turned.

"_Diagon, NOW!" _it cried, and Hestia looked at it, her jaw frozen open and the chunk of lemon-peel chicken she had between her chopsticks fell to the floor unnoticed.

Everyone around her looked grim, their food and seats already abandoned. Hestia felt at odds, frozen to her seat and looking up at Sturgis for direction, the chopsticks in her hand still suspended midair and her mouth still sightly open. "We have to go, Hestia," Sturgis told her, as gently as he could when his voice was full of urgency.

"Okay…" Hestia said vaguely, still not quite up to speed.

Sturgis took her gently by the shoulders. "Can you make sure no one around here saw that? And then _go home. _Do you hear me, Hestia? Go _home. _Lock up the wards behind you, and stay there!_" _

She shook herself, focusing. "Yeah, yeah. I can do that, okay." The others were already gone, and Sturgis popped out a second after releasing his hold on her. She didn't accompany them, it didn't even occur to her to offer.

The teenage girl who'd taken their order wandered out a few moments later, looking entirely unconcerned. Hestia found this sufficient evidence that no one had seen anything. She left the takeaway, removing her wand from her handbag and tucking it up her sleeve, at the ready but not readily visible to the muggles she passed in the street.

She'd already walked halfway home when it occurred to her to Apparate; the muggle streets were unfamiliar and it was getting dark, and the click-tap of her heels seemed to echo loudly on the asphalt. She was also attracting some unwanted attention; some Muggle men had leered and catcalled as she walked by. And, though she would never in a hundred thousand lifetimes admit it, her feet were starting to hurt.

She ducked into a convenient alleyway and Apparated to the stairwell of her building. It was only as she ascended the steps that she remembered the new wards Sturgis had put on the flat—the wards she didn't know how to unlock yet.

Hestia, her mind a good deal clearer given the walk through the cool spring air, weighed her options carefully. Sturgis _had _told her to stay here, but he'd been assuming that meant indoors and protected by the numerous charms on the place. Maybe she ought to Apparate somewhere else; Juno's in Cardiff, her parents' in Conwy, or even maybe just to Alice's over in Southwark. Those were probably the more reasonable options, but Hestia was worried about Sturgis. Waiting here for him to come home and worrying wasn't really much, but it was better than leaving and worrying.

She didn't wait long; not twenty minutes later, Sturgis stumbled up the stairway, looking much wearied in such a short amount of time. "What the hell are you doing out here?" he yelled at her, stopping short as his eyes fell on her sitting barefoot on the dirty floor opposite their front door.

"You put those new wards up and I didn't know how to undo them," Hestia explained, struggling upright and picking her shoes up from where they sat neatly lined up against the wall. "And I'm all right, really."

"Oh," he said simply, his indignation and slight anger deflating. "Here, let me show you."

Five minutes later, Hestia bustled around their kitchen, preparing some tea things while Sturgis sat at the table. Hesitantly, she spoke. "I suppose I shouldn't ask what all that was." It was a statement, really, but there was an invitation underneath.

Sturgis was quiet. "Yeah, thanks," he said finally, eyes glued onto the table top.

"It's nothing," Hestia demurred. "If I recall," she said lightly, affecting a cheeriness she couldn't quite feel when Sturgis was so heavily quiet, "I owe you that favor, you listened to me the other night. Consider that debt struck from our records."

"So stricken," Sturgis replied, a slow half-smile spreading across his face. Hestia set the mug down in front of him, tea with milk and enough sugar that her teeth ached in sympathy. On a strange impulse—because she generally wasn't the touchy sort who gave hugs on any random occasion as Sturgis liked to—she wrapped her arms around him and set her chin on his shoulder, bent down over him as he sat at their table. He seemed to settle into the gesture, tilting his head against hers.

After a moment, she clapped him on the shoulder, drawing away. "You'll be happy to know I'm going to bed now; no studying of any sort!" she said brightly, moving back to the counter to put the teabags and sugar packet away.

"Really?" He looked sceptic. "It's not even nine thirty."

"Yeah, really!" she said, playing offended at his disbelief. "I've had my services sold out to the Selwyn case, and they've got me reading court precedent after court precedent. I was a little tired today and I started going cross-eyed at about four. Intense reading does not mix well with drowsiness."

He got quiet again when she mentioned the Selwyn case, and Hestia wondered if she'd maybe said the wrong thing.

"You'll be careful with that, won't you?" It was quiet, worried, but ultimately hesitant, as if he wasn't sure he should say anything. He looked up at her from where he'd been staring into his tea.

"With the intense reading?" Hestia asked, still playfully, but she knew he meant something worse than that. "Yeah, I'll be sure not to permanently cross my eyes, as attractive as that would make me."

"Yeah, you never know what dangers lurk for you in ancient law books." He smiled slightly, still a little heavy around his eyes.

"Yeah, yeah," Hestia replied, trying to shake off the strange, uncomfortable feeling Sturgis' words had left her with.

She couldn't remember the last time she'd gone to bed at such a reasonable hour. Crawling into bed, the thought occurred to her that maybe she ought to try it more often; the satin of the duvet slid nicely against her violet silk nightgown and the cool cotton of her sheets felt like heaven and she wasn't counting down on one hand how many hours until she had to get up.

She had a particularly lovely dream, as well, though it did make it completely impossible not to burn a blush across her cheeks when she went in to the office the next morning to have Caradoc Dearborn, already working with Daniel on something or other, look up and wish her a good morning with such a friendly, handsome smile on his face.

* * *

I am back to school. If the first few days are anything to go by, I am no longer going to be Miss Speedy on updates. I have a life. And stuff to do. No, seriously. I barely remember what that's like, but I'm getting a crash-course re-education. Rest assured, I'm still working on stuff. The next part of _Magic _is started, as is the next part of this. The next chapter of _The Spare Princess _is kicking my ass, though, in terms of refusal to be written down. I can't seem to get started--the ideas are there, but I can't quite seem to catch hold of them. Blah.

Anyway, please review! It's the most powerful tool you have available, in terms of getting the next chapter out asap! Enable my schoolwork procrastination!

* * *


	4. Chapter 4

_Life in Black and White_

Chapter Four

* * *

A jumbled, stammering "Er, uh, thanks," was probably not the most graceful reply to a friendly "Good morning!" ever spoken (Hestia was mentally rewriting the exchange: "It _is_ lovely, isn't it?" or even the simple, standard "Good morning!" echo and wishing her cheeks didn't go so blatantly pink) but no one looked at her too oddly—although that was probably because Alasdair hadn't made it into work yet, and both Daniel and Caradoc were too polite to highlight her verbal embarrassments.

And, just as she settled into her desk chair, he spoke again. "Oh, Hestia, Dorcas wanted to see you in her office; I think you're going to be working in there this morning." Dread spiked through Hestia's stomach, despite the lack of any sort of doom-prophesying cast to Caradoc's face (which was, in fact, entirely friendly and unconcerned), getting called down to an office reminded her unpleasantly of the few times she and Sturgis had been taken to task for skiving off classes. She thanked him, a verbal endeavour which went over much smoother than her earlier attempts, perhaps due to her preoccupation with what awaited in Juriswitch Meadowes' office and not how well Caradoc looked in his well-tailored Juriswizard robes.

As she was walking towards the doorway, her heel caught on the strap of a briefcase that hung out into the walkway. It must have been some strange combination of edging around Caradoc's seat so she wouldn't accidentally touch him (because the thought, though discarded, tugged at her motor functions) and the focus of her attention on the impending doom that was Meadowes' office and not on where she was going, because Hestia Jones couldn't do anything if she couldn't walk in her ridiculous shoes; she had put on her mother's high heels at age seven and not looked back. Even as she threw her hands out to catch herself, though, she was entertaining fantasies of Caradoc somehow flying out of his seat to catch her like a hero.

Instead, though, she just ploughed into Alasdair as he sauntered in through the door. He did catch her, but it was hardly the stuff of fairytales and romance novels. He'd barely shoved her upright on her feet when the snide criticism was out of his mouth.

"What moronic torture contraptions are you wearing on your feet today?" he snarled, ripping around her to his desk in the corner. Caradoc and Daniel immediately looked to her feet, right as Hestia did. They weren't _moronic; _indigo patent leather stilettos to match the indigo waistcoat she was wearing today, perfectly professional and sedate.

"I can walk perfectly fine in my _moronic torture contraptions _when there aren't obstacles in the walkway to navigate," she hissed back at Alasdair. Her snarling, though, had the unintended consequence of killing the amused grin on Caradoc's face.

"Oh, Christ, I'm sorry, Hestia, that's mine. I shouldn't leave it hanging out in the path like that, of course you tripped." He scrambled out of his seat, gathering up the briefcase that she'd tripped over, looking deeply apologetic.

"Oh, no, no," Hestia fluttered, trying to suppress the stupid grin threatening on her face. "It's really not your fault, it's mine really," she stammered, too quick and insistent to be casual, her ankle rolling under her as she took a faulty step as though to prove her lack of coordination. "I should—" She hesitated just for a second as Alasdair shot her a triumphant and very evil sort of look, but then finished, defeated, with a quiet near whisper of, "—watch where I'm walking." She paused, looking around, shrinking in on herself in the awkward silence. "I'm going to head over to Juriswitch Meadowes' office, everyone have a nice morning."

She cringed as she walked out the door as quickly as she could, head down and her hand pressed to her forehead.

Hestia was quite sure she'd never applied herself more diligently to a task in her life. Meadowes even noticed it, complimenting her work ethic as the two sat in her office, shoes off on the floor amidst a spread of books and parchment. Hestia, though she thanked her blithely, barely heard the praise, more focussed on mentally distancing herself from the humiliating events of the morning than anything else. And distance herself she did…until the time for lunch came, and with it the realization that Alasdair had had all morning to process her reactions, and was sure to come to only one all-too-accurate conclusion.

Sturgis intercepted her at the Fountain of Magical Brethren, pulling her away to a lunch in Diagon just in time to save her from a devilishly grinning and fast-approaching Alasdair, followed by Daniel, who was looking a touch upset. All her fears and suspicions were confirmed in those two distant but painfully clear expressions; Alasdair had figured out precisely why Caradoc had flustered Hestia so badly—drat that man, he was too perceptive by half!—and Daniel just felt bad for her because he was nice.

She was unusually pensive throughout the very nice lunch at The Leaky Cauldron, and Sturgis set down his fork halfway in and regarded her curiously. "Are you all right, Hestia? You're awfully quiet."

"I just made an arse of myself this morning," Hestia explained, her cheeks pinking. "I'd rather not talk about it, but I'm going to have to face my coworkers soon, and I'm dwelling on it."

Sturgis nodded, picking his fork back up and shovelling a bite of cottage pie into his mouth. "Nothing more serious than that, eh?" he said when he finished chewing.

"No, it's silly," Hestia said miserably, staring down at the wood grain of the table and trying to convince herself. Sturgis made a hushed choking sort of noise around a mouthful of pie, and Hestia looked up, alarmed. His eyes were fixed over her shoulder, and she turned to look, his hiss of warning coming too late.

And she felt choked, too, though there was thankfully nothing in her mouth to further the issue. Rodolphus and Rabastan Lestrange had just taken a seat at the bar. Her head whipped around and she sunk into the booth, trying to minimize herself. Sturgis, on the other hand, had a snarl welded across his lips.

"Sturgis, stop that," she hissed, in a whisper that was probably a bit of an overkill. "They'll notice you."

"So what?" he said, but he already seemed to sense the stricken look that was on Hestia's face, and looked away. "Sorry," he apologized, scooting further into the booth to take himself out of their line of sight.

"Thanks," Hestia said, meaning it. This was not the day, time, or place she wanted to run into Rabastan. She didn't even want to look at him.

Sturgis, however, couldn't help but stare down the back of the booth as if his ugly gaze could burn through the wood and settle on the brothers at the bar. "What did you ever—'' he began hotly, snapping his mouth closed when Hestia's face fell.

This was not the time for that. Not that there was ever going to be a time where she wanted to discuss exactly what had happened between her and Rabastan with Sturgis—even if he was her best mate—but even if there was, the present couldn't have been further from it.

Sturgis seemed to sense she wanted out, so he shovelled a few more mouthfuls of pie in and stood to go. He threw an arm around her shoulders as they made a casually quick line for the door to the muggle street, keeping his face down and her shape subtly out of sight behind him as they passed the Lestrange brothers.

"Thanks, Sturgis," Hestia said emphatically when they'd reached the sunshine in muggle London.

"No problem," Sturgis said stoutly, removing his arm from her shoulders. Hestia checked her wristwatch, grimacing.

"I suppose there's nothing else to do but go back to work." Hestia cast a deflated sort of look back at the door to The Leaky Cauldron. The Floo fireplace, their method of entry and the way she had intended to return to the Ministry, was effectively cut off.

"Think I'll walk," she said breezily, making a big show of looking up at the pretty blue sky as though the fine weather had inspired her.

"You sure?" Sturgis asked, looking back at the pub. Hestia nodded firmly.

"It's not too far, and I've got some time to kill before I need to be back, anyway."

Sturgis shrugged. "Okay, sounds good. I have a patrol in Diagon, so I'm back that way…"

"I'll see you tonight, then? You going to be home at a reasonable time?"

Sturgis nodded, his hand on the door. "Shouldn't be too late, might make it home before you!"

"Ha!" Hestia called out over her shoulder, her heels already clicking down the pavement. The door swung shut behind Sturgis and Hestia quickened her pace, falling into a long-legged, hip swinging stride that, although was quite natural to her now, had taken quite a bit of practiced sauntering through the Ravenclaw dorms when they were empty.

The distinctive creaking sound of The Leaky Cauldron's door squealed out behind her, and familiar footsteps bounded up behind her. An amused grin on her face, Hestia stopped and turned on her heel to see what Sturgis had left unsaid and deemed important enough to retrace his steps.

And then she saw Rabastan Lestrange's darkly handsome face and she kept on turning without hesitation, swinging a rather ridiculous 360 and picking her quick stride right back up, pushing herself a little faster than before.

"Hestia!" he called after her, laughing (even _she _knew she'd probably looked ridiculous, turning pirouettes in the middle of the pavement) and the footsteps picked up until he was right behind her and she could smell the cologne she'd bought him for Christmas. His hand circled her upper arm and Hestia reacted _hard, _yanking herself out of his grasp so violently she nearly flung herself to the ground. "Merlin, Hestia, calm down, sorry!"

Her dangling earrings whipped against her cheek as she whirled on him, looking wide-eyed and apologetic, his hands in the air in the universal gesture of surrender. "Don't touch me!" Hestia screeched back at him anyway, somehow infuriated all the more by his innocent look.

"I'm not!" he yelled back at her, shaking his hands in the air to demonstrate the extent to which he was not touching her. Part of her was already back in the routine, back into the swing of their arguments, the silly, loud fights they'd get into over nothing, more from affection than anger. Part of her wanted to grin at him, toss out some new volley for him to bat back.

No way. Continuing this familiar scenario was letting him win, edging out onto the very thin ice of her woefully limited self control. She shook sense into herself and turned to go. "Leave me alone, then, fuck the hell off!" she stammered, somewhat incoherently. The clickity-click of her heels on the pavement was matched by the heavier tread of his boots behind her, keeping time.

"C'mon, Hestia, please?"

"Please what?" Hestia ripped out, hunching her shoulders in, trying to block him out. "Jesus, Rabastan, please _what?_ What could you possibly want?" She slowed her pace—it was futile and tiring.

He stopped trailing her, falling in step beside her. "Lunch?" he asked her hopefully, his expression optimistic and sweet.

"I already ate," Hestia said shortly.

"Dinner? Drinks? Me standing on the street outside your flat and talking to you through your window? Anywhere I might have you hold still, and maybe where I'm not afraid you're going to get angry and spike me in the shin with your heels? C'mon, Hestia, I'm sorry."

"These apologies and the chasing would have gone down very well a few months ago. As it pertains to now, though…" Hestia made a grand, facetious show of consideration and deep concentration. "Yeah, you can stop wasting your time."

Rabastan grabbed her hand and she wasn't quick enough to evade his grasp, wasn't strong enough to pull away when he was prepared for her fight. He pulled her into the doorway of a derelict building, pushing her back against the brick wall and leaning in until her head swam with his lovely cologne and everything that had been perfectly right about her and Rabastan, everything she'd never wanted to leave.

She wanted him to kiss her. More than anything in the world at that particular moment, she wanted him to kiss her, wanted him to want her. Her hand was still in his, his body inches from hers, and all the sense and reason she possessed abandoned her.

With just the lightest little brush of his lips against hers, Rabastan leaned back an inch and smiled winningly at her and Hestia gathered the remnants of her self control, balled her free hand into a fist at her side to keep herself from throwing her arms around his neck. "Let me walk you back to work." He grinned mischievously as he led her out of the alcove, his hand still tight around hers.

"You wanted to talk?" Hestia asked grudgingly as their silent, hand-in-hand walk approached its end, daring a sideways glance up at him.

"Dinner?" Rabastan held out, grinning lightly. "Please?"

"Rabastan…" Hestia trailed off even as his smile brightened, his dark brown eyes sparkling. He still knew her well enough to know when he'd won her over.

When they reached the hallway outside the apprentices' office, he leaned down and pressed a chaste, gentlemanly kiss to her cheek. Hestia's breath still caught in her chest, so close to everything she shouldn't want so badly.

"I'll pick you up tomorrow night?" he prodded, still too close for her to think clearly and she almost said 'yes.'

Even senseless as she was, though, Hestia knew better than to have him around to hers, where Sturgis might answer the door and be mightily displeased.

She put a familiar hand on his forearm, trailing her fingertips over the beautiful, expensive charcoal grey wool of his robes. "Can I just meet you somewhere? It would be better."

Rabastan got a grim, amused look on his face. "Ah, yes, Mr. Podmore won't be pleased with either of us, will he?"

"Rabastan," Hestia scolded gently, privately dismayed by the obvious truth in his words.

He looked thrilled, his face lighting up at her voice. "I've missed hearing you say my name. There's no one in the world who makes it sound lovelier than you do."

She approved his plans, agreeing to meet him in The Leaky Cauldron at seven the next evening. As he walked away, Hestia despaired. Every word he spoke was balm and barb, both. They soothed away the sting of rejection—she'd walked away and he hadn't followed for long and this all was _beautiful—_but every word carried with it a tiny fragment of a memory; all of the many things that were wrong with Rabastan, all the things that were wrong with her, remembering why they hadn't worked and knowing that nothing had changed, really.

There was no relief to be had on the other side of the office door, either. Alasdair and Daniel sat at their desks, fury and disapproval and pity written across their faces. Of course they had heard every word.

"You're not," Alasdair said derisively. The look on his face cast aspersions on Hestia's competence.

"Hestia, really?" Daniel looked betrayed. Alasdair, too, in his prickly bastard sort of way.

And rightly so, Hestia thought a little miserably. They'd been an audience to the implosion of four months previous, had near-to-carried her through a good week of her apprenticeship when she'd been a useless, teary puddle on the floor, picking up all of her work and splitting it between themselves so she wouldn't get tossed out of the program. This was disrespecting all their kindness, throwing it back in their faces.

"Can we not?" Hestia asked, nearly in tears. She half-expected someone to object again, but was too relieved when Alasdair kept silent to think too much on it.

It was a long, quiet afternoon. Henley, Dearborn, and Meadowes were in session with the Wizengamot, one of the smaller, preliminary hearings before the Selwyn trial officially began, and the apprentices had been left to research and paperwork in their cramped little space. Alasdair and Daniel respectfully kept silent, each of them deep in concentration on their own work.

The only bright spot seemed to be that, in the dramatic wake of Rabastan, Hestia's lamentable interaction with Caradoc Dearborn had been entirely forgotten. She bolstered her flagging spirits with that little bit of golden news and managed not to cry all day, and when she finally got home, she found she didn't want to anymore.

She half-lied to Sturgis about a rough day at work because she couldn't manage to paste a convincing smile on her face. He made her dinner and took her out for real ice cream, and then he made her put her books away and cuddled her up on the couch, listening to a programme on the wireless.

She fell asleep with her head on his chest and his arms wrapped around her. She had a strangely realistic dream about Juriswitch Meadowes' disembodied voice yelling at her about some sort of meeting she was late to and jumped to consciousness while Sturgis was trying to extract himself from her grasp. "Sorry," Sturgis winced. "I was trying not to wake you. I have to go." He didn't say where. Hestia knew better than to ask; she was getting more adept at recognizing the kinds of questions Sturgis couldn't answer before she even asked them.

"I'll just go to bed—my bed's more comfortable." She put a hand up, trying to straighten the neat twist her long, glossy hair was tucked into. It was a lost cause; at her first touch, the remaining hair pins gave up and it all tumbled down.

"Don't I look pretty?" Hestia yawned, arching her back and stretching. She fluffed her long, kinked hair dramatically.

Sturgis smiled strangely, looking at her far too closely, like he was memorizing her face. In the queerest tone of voice, he said clearly to her, "I love you, Hestia, d'you know?"

A confused half-smile on her face, Hestia turned around to look at him. "Yeah, I do." There was an awkward pause, and Hestia prattled loudly to fill the silence. "Another man in love with me? God, that's six in one day! I hope this doesn't have to get funny, Sturgis, I wouldn't want to ruin our friendship."

He grabbed her and hugged her, pressing his forehead to hers. "Girls are icky," he informed her gravely. Hestia bumped her nose against his.

"Good, good! I'm glad you feel that way." She paused and the silly moment fell away. "Love you too, Sturgis. Not many people can promise to be best friends forever at eleven and still be going ten years later."

She worried about Sturgis from the moment she heard the front door click shut. It was awful, and she wondered how she'd never really worried about him before now. It kept her up nearly an hour, laying in bed and wondering what he was doing.

It wasn't a very good distraction, really. In fact, she used the upcoming encounter with Rabastan to distract her from worrying about where Sturgis had gone.

And then she wondered what on _Earth _Sturgis was going to do or say or think of her when he found out she'd spoken to Rabastan, had agreed to a dinner, was contemplating having him back…

She just hoped Sturgis came back home soon, was here to get angry and outraged at her for being such an idiot.

Hestia felt awful when she woke, like she hadn't slept at all. But Sturgis was bustling around in the kitchen and yelling through the walls to see if she wanted jam or butter on her toast, so she smiled and it was a good morning.

* * *

Holy god. This having a life thing is hard. I forgot. Damn.

Anyway, hope y'all enjoyed the chapter. Please review? I feel like the fandom has been dying down in the past weeks, probably due to the beginning of the academic year in so many places.

Also, I'd like to share some random information with you:

I generally don't tend to 'paste down' my ideas of what certain characters look like in terms of actual people, but for some reason both Caradoc and Rabastan ARE certain actors in my head. It's strange. Aaron Eckhart (Harvey Dent in The Dark Knight) IS my Caradoc, and Ben Barnes (Prince Caspian in the movie of the same name) IS Rabastan Lestrange, right down to the relative ages. And Alasdair Diggory is a taller, lankier, meaner, less-pretty version of Robert Pattinson, the movie Cedric Diggory.

(I watched way too many movies this summer, can't you tell?)

* * *


	5. Chapter 5

_Life in Black and White_

Chapter Five

* * *

The first thing Rabastan did after the full round of compliments on Hestia's appearance, her brilliant red robes and red lipstick, was declare The Leaky Cauldron far too common for the night.

He offered her his arm and she took it hesitantly, running her tongue over her front teeth. He smiled at her so happily that it interrupted her mental mantra of _mistake mistake mistake _and butterflies flitted up in her chest and she couldn't quite beat down the stupid grin that oozed across her face to mirror him.

The Silver Elm, the finest restaurant in Diagon Alley, already had a table for them. They were greeted deferentially, shown immediately to their seats with quiet, elegant efficiency. And then Hestia looked around, _really _looked around, and the butterflies fell down dead as the memories of her last meal here fell in. Then she just felt ill.

She stopped dead a few steps from the table, hauling Rabastan, whose arm she still had hers looped through, to a standstill. Rabastan turned to look at her questioningly. "Hestia? Are you all right?"

"This is a bad idea," she said faintly, feeling viciously overwhelmed. Her eyes roamed the room, found the private table in the back corner. She remembered exactly where it was, remembered exactly the way she found her way to the street from it, blind with tears and indignant fury and shame, remembered leaving a thunderstruck Rabastan sitting there abandoned, flanked by his family and completely clueless on how to fix what had been done.

"The restaurant? We can go somewhere—." Even as he offered a change of venue, he seemed to realize the huge mistake he'd made in bringing her there.

"Yes, the restaurant. And you. I shouldn't be here. This is all a terrible idea. I need to go." Hestia felt flustered, caught up in a storm of unpleasant memories.

He was already apologizing. "I'm sorry, Hestia, of course you wouldn't want to come here, I can't believe I didn't remember…I'm sorry, I just wanted to take you somewhere nice." She wanted away. Pulling her arm from where it looped around his, she turned and walked, her steps faltering, her heels were stumbling blocks and she couldn't walk fast enough, she wanted to _run. _She wanted away from this place, away from him, away from the almost tangible memories that tasted like iron on the back of her tongue, of his proud, cold family bearing down on her around that table in the back, those dismissive words and disdainful stares for this low and common girl of no good relations and only a rather vague, incomplete genealogy to recommend her as a pureblood. No money, no status, just the conspicuous lack of any muggle blood in the past few generations to make her tolerable; merely _tolerable_, not good enough for a Lestrange, not good enough for their son and brother. They had made that clear. And she had fled, too choked to hide her tears like she so desperately wanted to.

He'd never come after her.

Away from The Silver Elms was as much 'away' as Hestia could manage; Rabastan dogged her steps, so wide-eyed and honestly, genuinely _sorry _that her momentary resolve, as granite-strong as it had seemed under the crushing memories of rejection, crumbled before him.

"Anywhere you want," he promised desperately. "I'll never bring you back there again."

Hestia couldn't speak for a moment, trying to tamp down everything down until all she had left was a chill. Out of sheer spite, she insisted on the Chinese takeaway in Muggle Clapham. It was the only place she knew in Muggle London, and she wanted to go somewhere muggle, wanted to pull Rabastan out of his privileged world. It was senseless and mean, Hestia knew, but the blanched hesitation on his face was maliciously satisfying. "You said _anywhere," _she qualified breezily, adding in a suddenly hard voice, "Or I could just go home."

"But our clothes," he put in, the closest thing he dared to dissension.

"Oh, but don't you remember?" Hestia replied brightly, her loosely applied façade of cheer grating even to her own ears, as she sifted through her handbag for her wand. "I'm a common shopgirl, Rabastan! I know all sorts of spells to fix that, I've been working in Madame Malkins since the summer after fifth year. That's the first time you noticed me…I was on my knees, pinning your hem." Hestia _refused _to be ashamed of the job that had given her pocket money on Hogsmeade weekends sixth and seventh year, custom-tailored robes to be _envied _for the Leaving Ball, had supported her through her first, unpaid year of apprenticeship, and kept her in clothing she would never have been able to afford otherwise.

Her words were the end of it and her wand marked the defeat as Rabastan's expensive, well-tailored robes shortened into the sort of jacket Hestia had seen her respectable looking neighbor wearing. Hestia was _good _at those sorts of temporary adjustment spells from her years of summer employment, and the jacket was well-fitted and (as far as Hestia could tell) reasonably fashionable. Rabastan hunched in it like it was a potato sack with "MUDBLOOD" daubed on it in bright red paint.

It said something, or so Hestia felt, that he submitted to it without complaint. They walked through Diagon, back to the Leaky Cauldron and into Muggle London. In terms of punishments, this one was entirely fitting. So pleased was she with the cowed way Rabastan walked through Diagon in his magically altered muggle clothing that she even accepted his arm when he gingerly offered it to her. It almost seemed like a mutual win (or at least a canceling out of two supremely unpleasant situations) until they Apparated to Clapham and walked into the grimy, grease-filmed little takeaway.

Hestia had been casually pondering their overdressed state as Rabastan released her arm to open the door for her. The chivalry that seemed to be ingrained into Rabastan was a welcome touch—Sturgis purposely shoved doors shut in her face and they'd have a laugh about it and she'd return the favor at the first opportunity, while Daniel and Alasdair would hold the door behind themselves for her to catch hold, but Rabastan had that showy, open-the-door-for-my-princess-and-stand-aside courtesy. And did Hestia love having a production made of her.

She hadn't even quite got the 'thank you' out of her mouth when straw-yellow on navy wool smacked onto her retinas with a nasty sting of the very worst sort of reality. _Why _had she brought them here? Of all the stupid ideas…! And it was too much to hope that…she froze in the door, Rabastan not quite stopping short enough behind her.

"Hestia!" Sturgis hadn't seen Rabastan behind her, he looked more surprised and not yet furious at her presence, although, bizarrely, there was that edge of panic on his voice, like she'd walked in on him doing something he oughtn't, or at least something she wasn't supposed to know about. Maybe that was just projecting her own panic onto him. "You look pretty!" he complimented her, recovering himself slightly. "What are you doing here, I though you were in Cardiff with…"

Rabastan gently propelled her forward, a familiar hand on the small of her back. The friendly, welcoming air in the room was blown out by an Arctic chill and, lo, how the tables had turned. Hestia had walked herself right into her own mire, the punishment she had wrought on Rabastan was coming back to her, three four, five-fold.

In his black knight chivalry, Rabastan greeted Sturgis with a courteous, starched politeness. His dark eyes flew sideways and he nodded respectfully at the companions Hestia had been too distracted to notice.

Hestia's mouth dropped open a little before she recovered enough to gasp out a greeting. "Juriswitch Meadowes, Juriswizard Dearborn, nice to see you," she managed somehow, horror digging deeper into her stomach.

Make that six, seven, eight-fold retribution. Sturgis was straw-yellow and fury-red on navy wool, now, looking ready to smash his fist into Rabastan's face and drag Hestia home by her hair. With her two immediate superiors as witnesses. It didn't even occur to her to wonder what they were doing there with Sturgis.

"It's nice to see you, Hestia, you look very pretty," Juriswitch Meadowes told her so kindly that, had Hestia not already been six feet under and sinking, it would have floored her.

Rabastan was not quite so eager to glory in Hestia's troubles as he might have been. The hand on her back curled around, his arm a support around her waist and a red cape in the face of Sturgis' bull-mad rage. "Hestia, we can find another restaurant."

"There's no need," Caradoc Dearborn (Hestia finally really registered his presence and shrank even further back, rather unthinkingly further into Rabastan's arms) said firmly, casting a censuring glance at his younger companion. Sturgis, for his part, seemed to have moved beyond his initial plan of murder-kidnapping to the all-around neater double homicide, such was the anger that crystallized his frame.

"No," Hestia said, in a voice that seemed disembodied for how insanely serene it was. "It's all right…we'll go." Dearborn and Meadowes nodded, clearly unsure of the exact circumstances but perceptive enough to grasp the skeletal outline of the situation.

As she turned, the burn of Sturgis' anger stayed in her vision, like she'd stared too long at a bright light and it was branded into her retinas, even when she closed her eyes against it.

Rabastan's arm remained around her waist and it was the only thing that kept her knees and hips and ankles locked and aligned underneath her, kept her walking and not crumpling under the litany of _fuckfuckfuckfuckfuck _that was twining around her head like a tourniquet. She was trying to remember the words they'd exchanged the night before, the awkward, out-of-nowhere declarations of love and 'best-friends-forever' but she had the ugliest feeling that she'd left them, trodden underfoot, on the greasy floor of the takeaway.

Rabastan was one of the few…maybe the _only _thing Hestia and Sturgis had ever fought over. From the moment she'd mentioned his name and their very first dinner date, Sturgis had vehemently objected at every turn, for reasons he would never quite explain. And it was the one thing Sturgis had seriously ever asked of Hestia…_please don't,_ he'd asked her, one wretched night while she bawled in his arms—another night, after the family disaster and her tearful exit, that Rabastan didn't come after her. _That family is bad news, nothing you need to be anywhere near. Don't you _dare_ take him back, should he come crawling. You are a hundred thousand times better than that._

And he'd _meant_ that, too. And she'd promised. And here she was, throwing it all back in his face. It was hard work to get Sturgis angry but when he was angry, he was enraged beyond reason and it wasn't a huge stretch of the imagination to believe she'd go home to find her things dumped in the hallway and the wards changed out. That's what he'd done when he'd caught Aidan cheating on him and he'd seemed rather less infuriated about that.

He'd never been angry with her before, and she trembled at the rage she had always told herself she would never do anything to warrant. Hestia had stumbled on an ultimatum and, by sheer ridiculous circumstance (and maybe a few poor choices on her own part, she would concede), chosen wrongly. Even looking at Rabastan, who was doing his best to look chastened and somber though Hestia could tell he was only barely restraining that smirk of smug, possessive triumph from spreading across his face, as he steered her back to Diagon—she _knew _with a stark and simple certainty that was like a slimy rock in her stomach that he was _wrong_. She ought to be jerking herself out of his gentle-handed grip, kicking her shoes off and flat out _running _back to that takeaway to throw herself prostrate before her once-in-a-lifetime best mate and ruin her third-favorite dress robes on the filthy floor and beg forgiveness.

Instead, though, she just listened to Rabastan mull over options for dinner, clinging to him because it felt like it was all she had to do, because he was relatively dry land and 'any port in a storm' and other such sad, desperate rationalizations. Still, he noticed her distress through his triumph. He hugged her closer, pausing on a street corner, waiting for the loud muggle vehicles to stop for them. His hands found the sides of her face and directed her gaze up at him, his thumbs stroking her cheekbones. "I love you, Hestia," he told her simply, kissing her gently.

It was the scene Hestia craved. It was storybook romance and love and beautiful clothing bright against the grey London street. It was heartbreaking.

They didn't go to another restaurant. Rabastan took her back to his townhouse in residential Diagon and Hestia made herself absolutely sick over how absolutely right making love with Really-Wrong-Rabastan felt. It shouldn't feel right _at all, _she thought, feeling a little less miserable than any common slag like her had any right to feel. But she couldn't leash the happy little smile that melted across her face as Rabastan wrapped his arms around her, pressing his nose into her hair and settling in to fall asleep. Loving Rabastan wasn't enough, but it wasn't nothing, either.

"I'm so sorry, Hestia," he whispered in her ear. "I don't care what my family thinks and I'm _sorry _I let them say those things. Rodolphus and Bella can fuck right off; I wouldn't touch any sister of hers with a ten-foot-pole. Lucius Malfoy can _have_ Narcissa Black." Hestia's throat hurt too much to talk, because he seemed so sincere.

It really wasn't fair. Because, fuck her life, she _loved _Rabastan for all his faults and wretched family, stupid as that made her. Maybe he wasn't her 'once-in-a-lifetime' but Hestia had always thought that loves were rather like dresses—there were a great many that didn't fit, some that did but not quite right in the hips or the bust, some that looked pretty, and the few that you never wanted to take off…but no particular one you were absolutely meant to wear, the end. You tried them on until you happened on one that you liked enough to take home…that didn't mean there weren't others out on the racks somewhere, but you were content enough with yours to stop looking.

She loved Rabastan…but she loved Sturgis more. She knew that in a serene, cemented way that was not open to further discussion. Sturgis was the once-in-a-lifetime in a way that no lover could ever be, the best friend most people never got to have. He would _always _be the choice, so long as she was forced to make one. She'd always known that, and Hestia was not entirely sure how she'd got herself into this position.

She woke up to a magnificent bouquet of flawless cream roses and smiled sadly at Rabastan, who seemed to be too thrilled with her presence to see the truth behind the expression.

She cleaned herself up as best as she could in Rabastan's bathroom, not quite sure how the same spells she used to clean and press her robes at home just didn't seem to work right, as though universe was conspiring to block her escape from the shame of going to work in the same clothes she'd worn the night before. Maybe it was her imagination, but she _looked _just unkempt enough for everyone at work to know how much of a slag she really was, that she was in a row with her best friend over a man and couldn't go home. The robes weren't really work-appropriate, even with the adjustments she managed to make to them; darkening the crimson red to maroon, raising the neckline, extending the hem with a few reasonably long-term charms that wouldn't fade on her in the middle of the day. They were tart robes and there was no real way around it. It was tailored in every seam.

And Juriswitch Meadowes and Juriswizard Dearborn were sure to know. Hestia cringed, her cheeks burning with furnace fury at just the thought of working with them. She could only imagine what Sturgis had said after she'd fled.

It didn't matter, in the end. No one had a spare thought to even glance at a lowly apprentice like Hestia. Juriswizard Henley had been found dead in his house along with his wife, a frightening conjuration in the sky above their home, a snake and a skull written above the building in glittering verdant stars and haze and the Department of Magical Law was a confetti storm of chaos.

Ophion Selwyn was laughing in his cell.


	6. Chapter 6

_Life in Black and White_

Chapter Six

* * *

It was too long of a day to cry. Hestia lost all desire to do anything of the sort immediately upon her arrival to the department. It was hell, really, and what good were tears in hell? Life outside didn't exist, the catastrophe of Hestia's personal life paling to the burn-red welt that was Joshua Henley's…death. There was always that hesitation, the pause before the speaker finally settled on the generic, faultless _death_. _Murder_ went unsaid, _assassination _even more of a taboo. Murder meant malice, assassination implied agenda, organization, grander intent. No one said it. No one dared.

Juriswitch Meadowes and Juriswizard Dearborn spent the day in a cell in the Auror's block, interrogating Ophion Selwyn. He refused to give them anything, refusing to speak at all. The single word he deigned to utter was a contemptuous '_mudbloods'_ before falling back into his smug silence. Meadowes and Dearborn were trying to push a Veritas-compulsion motion through the Wizengamot, but Selwyn's defense team was fighting it, and, for they price they came at, they certainly weren't bad at their jobs. The motion had been all but shot down before the 'lunch break' the apprentices were given—they were basically told to get the hell out around noon. With all of the minor cases suspended until further notice, there was nothing they were truly capable of doing independently. Everything to do with the Selwyn case and Henley's…death was far too important for them to be trusted—they were too slow, too inefficient, too incompetent to be left to anything, and there wasn't the time for Dorcas and Caradoc to be proofreading and editing the paperwork and hovering over their shoulders.

Caradoc had popped in to give them the disappointing news about the imminent rejection of the Veritas-compulsion motion, prompting Alasdair to grumble—with tight and utter hatred in his voice—"So? The bastard has to eat, right? Slip him some." Daniel touched him gently on the shoulder, not saying anything. Alasdair didn't shrug it off, curling further in on himself, his sharp, proud shoulders sagging, fury and grief written legibly on his smoldering, down-turned face. Hestia's heart turned in her stomach, where it had been sitting all day long; it was oddly comforting. Alasdair might act like a bastard who couldn't be bothered, but he loved all of them. They were family.

"Go home…and for the love of God, be careful with yourselves!" Caradoc was ashen-faced, his jaw tight as he swept his gaze over the three sorry apprentices.

"Should we really?" Daniel asked quietly. "Do you think…?" They danced around the topic again, and, again, no one was brave enough to step across the perimeter.

"Yes, I do." His eyes settled a little heavily on Hestia, and she froze in singled-out panic. "Be careful, please, don't act your age and get into something stupid."

Hestia pulled her gaze away from him, looking down to where her golden-lacquered fingernails were stripping her quill nervously, gathering her nerve before speaking up (her eyes still glued down.) The others were moving away, moving to gather their things and follow the suggestion they'd been given.

"Hestia?" His hands moved into her line of vision, onto the desk. He'd softened his voice, and Hestia kept her fingers busy, peeling bits and pieces off her bluejay-feather quill.

"I was just thinking!" she burst out, startling him—his hands jumped on the desk. "Well, I read the motion—the frame of questioning implicated Selwyn as a suspect due to his affiliation. Could we maybe just blind the motion to his current criminal proceedings and treat him as a hostile witness? Separate the cases? You might be able to push that through."

In Hestia's idle, half-hearted romance-novel imagining, this was the point where a smile would spread over Caradoc's wan, weary face and he would congratulate her excitedly on her stroke of sheer genius. She'd help draft the motion and the resulting information would provide vital evidence and their entire organization would topple and they'd stick You-Know-Who and all the rest in Azkaban forever and be done with it. And it would all end in a joyful wedding (she tried to stick Caradoc up at the altar—it was easy to see Sturgis smiling up the aisle at her beside him—but then Rabastan burst through the door behind her on a broomstick and kidnapped her from the cathedral in her wedding white.)

But he just nodded, only the slightest pleased tilt to his mouth, not quite real enough to be a smile. "Very well thought-out, Hestia—Dorcas is drafting it now."

The praise did not go missed, and a blush rose to Hestia's face as he spoke, her smile a little wider than it had been in quite a while. Alasdair, though deeply stricken by his mentor's death, would not have been Alasdair if he couldn't manage a surreptitious, sideways sneer. This fact, among a few others, saved him from having one of the silver scroll weights that were in shamefully easy reach on her desk flung at his head.

Hestia took a bit longer gathering her things than the other two—Daniel and Alasdair had fair flown from the room, leaving their desks scattered in their anxiety to be out of this suddenly unpleasant place. Hestia took her time straightening her desk, carefully filed away the various bits of leftover paperwork that would no doubt be vitally important to someone in a few days' time.

She did not want to go home. She had not quite decided _if_ she was going to go home. Or where she was going to go if she didn't. Or what she was going to say if she did. Or…really anything. The Department of Magical Law might've been an unpleasant mess, but it wasn't _her_ mess. That was waiting outside for her.

So she dawdled. When she'd finished cleaning her own desk, she moved on to Alasdair's mess of a workspace. He'd probably wring her neck for touching it, but this was desperate.

Two hours later, the cluttered little apprentice annex was ordered in a way only Hestia could have configured—she found space for things when there had been none before. The piles of books on the floor were gone, neatly ordered on bookshelves she'd found abandoned in a supply closet somewhere. Every roll of parchment was tagged and ordered in one of the cubby holes on the far wall, every desk and chair at perfect angles with the walls.

She sat down on the floor in the middle of her perfectly ordered office and burst into the tears that had been too long in coming.

This was a perfectly unpleasant shock for the man who walked into the office. Confronted with the age-old male conundrum, _there's a crying woman, what do I do? _, the man opted for the simplest; _let's awkwardly carry on and just pretend she's all right._

"Er, I can't find Dor—Juriswitch Meadowes, could you…Hestia?" Hestia's head snapped up at the surprised mention of her name. Red hair met her eyes…spectacles, tall and attractive.

"Fabian?" Hestia gurgled through her tear-clogged nose.

"You're a mess." He bent down and grabbed her by the wrists, helping her up.

"Yeah." Hestia agreed, walking over to where her handbag sat nicely square on her desk, pulling out the lace-edged handkerchief and wiping her tears.

"So, er, Dorcas?" Fabian's hands were deep in his pockets, and he rocked back and forth on his heels.

"Probably still with Selwyn. That's where they've been all day." Hestia turned her head away and poked at her face with her fingertips—sticky and swollen and (she was sure) a vivid, posy pink.

"They're not in the DMLE rooms, though."

"The Auror block," Hestia agreed, throwing her shoulders back, trying to scrape some of her dignity from where it was ground into the carpet. "Some jurisdiction thing I don't understand yet."

Fabian turned to go, lingering at the doorway. "Ah, er, sorry to interrupt." He seemed to be struggling with himself. She laughed a little to herself.

"I'm okay, really, Fabian. You can go." He nodded at her in obvious relief and took off out the door. "And _you_ should go," she muttered to herself, tossing her bag over her shoulder.

A paper airplane whapped her on the forehead as she made to leave fifteen minutes later (she'd noticed some scrolls Daniel had stashed on the top of a cabinet and made the time to file them appropriately.) It was Juriswitch Meadowes' handwriting, asking for some scrolls from her office, ending with a _(Fabian told me you were still here.)_

Hestia dashed down the hall to Dorcas' reasonably tidy office (the desk was, admittedly, a bit unorganized but Hestia stilled her itchy hands) and pulled out the labeled scrolls from the caddy that made up one of the walls.

The Auror's block was not a friendly place. Though Selwyn was the only current prisoner, the hall somehow set Hestia's hair on end. The Auror who searched her was a little rough, too, and she got the feeling he was laughing at her robes. He waved her through into the interrogation room and Hestia fluttered, readjusting her robes and trying to conceal the shudder that coursed through her.

Ophion Selwyn didn't look like a monster. He looked a little like her dad. But then, that was the Joneses—they had a bit of everyone's blood, youngest sons and daughters who'd married into the Jones family every so often for a lack of better options, and every once in a while out came a kid with Prewett-red hair, or a bit of lift to the nose like some of the Parkinsons or, in the case of Hestia's older sister, the Flints' notoriously bad teeth (her parents had had them fixed).

Dorcas and Caradoc nearly fell over themselves when she was nearly shoved through the cell door by the guard, who slammed it shut behind her.

"I was going to meet you for these! Outside!" Dorcas exclaimed, motioning to the files. Hestia shrugged, wide-eyed, slightly slack-jawed, and feeling as though she'd missed something important.

She held up her hands helplessly. "I didn't know! They just shoved me in here. I…sorry!" She handed them off to Caradoc, getting them off her hands as quick as she could, flustered and upset by the surprise and dismay that had greeted her. "I'll go, I was on my way out…"

Calmly, from his seat at the table in the center of the room, Ophion Selwyn looked her over. With a slight grin on his face, he nodded at Hestia and she really couldn't locate her stomach.

"I'll talk to _her_."

Hestia lingered in the stairwell far longer than was justifiable, even in the given circumstances. She sort of wished she had a cigarette, not that she'd ever bought a pack in her life. She'd occasionally bum one on a night out when the drink had got the better of her, but it was never something she'd craved. She didn't even really crave it now, but she wished she had something to do with her hands. She had to smile at one of the neighbors who happened by—the woman looked at her strangely. And why not—she was just _standing _there, thirty feet from her front door and not moving.

Her grip strangled the strap of her bag, the patent leather slick with the sweat on her palms. She didn't even know whether to hope that Sturgis was gone or to hope he was home.

She'd just moved to open the door when it swung open, very nearly slamming into her. "Oh, god, sorry!" a somehow-familiar voice called, bustling around the door in a blur of dark brown and powder pink.

Hestia didn't recognize her at first. Gone was the gaudy, glitzy makeup and horrid clothing. The ugly streaks of color in her hair were gone, the dark, plain brown in a neat little bun on the top of her head. She was in pink and black, muggle clothing, neat and conservative, a huge bag slung over her shoulder.

"Hestia!" Maggie's hand was on her arm, concern on her face. "Sorry! I just threw the door open, how silly of me!"

"No, no, it's all right." Hestia recovered herself, grabbing hold of the door that was propped open on Maggie's bony hip. "What are you--?"

"I just stopped over to see Sturgis…I have a ballet class in Kensington in an hour, thought I'd stop by and see how he was—." Maggie bit her lip, falling quiet.

Hestia felt helpless. Obviously Sturgis wasn't all right. It was her fault. Somehow, the question, "You take ballet classes?" fell out of her mouth without her even really thinking about it.

Maggie flushed, nodding. "With the English National Ballet School…it's muggle, but…" she trailed off.

"That's wonderful, Maggie," Hestia assured her, with much more surety in her voice than she felt.

There was a slight awkward pause. "He's not there, Hestia. He Flooed out just a few minutes ago."

Very quietly, Hestia spoke. "That's all right, I just…I just…"

And she didn't cry. She just smiled nicely at Maggie, who cautiously excused herself with all the right sort of excuses, and went into the flat that no longer really felt like hers.

She threw an enlarged valise together with more than a month's worth of clothing and some cosmetics. She hesitated before she cleared out the shower of her toiletries… Sturgis would surely notice that. A few outfits out of the closet, a few books off the shelf, some of the makeup from her vanity…even if he was looking, he wouldn't find those empty spaces. The bottles in the shower would be obvious.

Hestia left those. She'd buy new ones. She didn't want to make it look like she wasn't intending to come back.

Everything was in its place. The wards were the same…maybe he _wanted _her to come home. She didn't really believe that. She warded the door behind her when she went.

Rabastan was ecstatic when she came in with her things, eagerly relieving her of the weight in the entrance hall. He had to set the bag down when she started bawling there, barely in the door. His arms were around her and he smelled warm and safe and Hestia didn't know _why _this had to be such a mess, what was wrong with him, why did Sturgis have to be such a demanding, unreasonable _arse _about this all?

Hestia wished a lot of things. She wished she could have both, that she could love Sturgis and love Rabastan and never have to choose between. That wasn't unreasonable, was it? It wasn't the _same _sort of love, why couldn't she have both? She wished Sturgis could understand. She wished Rabastan didn't have to be such an antagonistic bastard. She wished that Sturgis had been home, to stop her packing and make sure she didn't leave.

But, alone, she couldn't help herself. She was scared. To go home was to be met with anger and disappointment, and Hestia had never dealt with those terribly well. She'd spent her life studiously weaving around those unpleasantries, and avoidance was what she knew. Rabastan was _good _in the immediate sense. He was the one who'd welcome her, twine his arms around her waist and kiss her throat and make her forget, make her feel wonderful _now._

And it _had_ been a terrible day. Even when she'd been hustled out of the interrogation room, Selwyn was still refusing to speak…to anyone but her. It didn't do to linger thinking on why. Now she didn't even have work as a relative respite. God only knew what sort of mess she'd walk in tomorrow to find; Dorcas and Caradoc had been more than adamant that they would not be subjecting her further to Selwyn, that he was in no position to be making demands on them and that he was getting absolutely no concessions. Dorcas chalked it up to pureblood mania, stating that under no circumstances would they be pandering to his prejudices by providing a pureblood liaison to speak for her muggle born superiors. Even Caradoc had looked doubtful, though he fully supported the course of action prescribed: keeping Hestia out of sight.

She really wished she hadn't had to wear the slag robes to work. She laid full blame on the inappropriate outfit, and was fully ready to rip them apart at the seams when she had a chance to change clothing.

She had been quite ready to burst into tears after leaving the Department of Magical Law; having her misdeeds and slattern behavior shoved up in her face, as Sturgis was so sure to do, was not an appealing option in the least. God, _she knew!_ She _knew_!

In for a penny, in for a pound, too. Indulge in the selfish before she gathered up her courage to go home and face the music, because there would be no more of Rabastan after she'd found her backbone.

That thought ruined everything. The perfect, adoring look on his face was blurred by her intense desire to memorize it, the touch of his hand between her shoulder blades dulled as she tried to cement the sensation in her mind. She was trying too hard, and ruining it all in the meanwhile.

Rabastan made her dinner and cuddled her in bed after pudding, took down her hair and ran his fingers through it and scratched her scalp. He talked about tomorrow—that thing Hestia had always thrilled to hear about before.

Tomorrow was the thing boys never liked to talk about. That was a word she'd learned to avoid—boys got funny about 'tomorrow', got distant and vague and stopped meeting her eyes and started missing appointments.

And now she had a boy who liked to talk about tomorrow. And cuddle with clothes on and play with her hair and use 'we'. And she couldn't keep him. It left a sour taste in her mouth. Fucking unfair, this was.

She was angry, she decided a few hours later as Rabastan slept, curled up around her. And not at herself—she'd spent a lot of time in the past few days being angry at herself, so that was old. She was angry—really, truly, deeply angry for the first time in their relationship—at Sturgis. And maybe it was the rage of a little girl who couldn't keep the puppy that followed her home, but Hestia kept it close all the same. He'd made her promise and _why? _What had she ever asked of him? Not even the simplest of questions, lately! Sturgis and his stupid secrets and insane hours and mysterious friends and ridiculous demands! Why couldn't she just keep the fucking puppy? Why couldn't he just get over it and fake some enthusiasm like a decent friend?

She fell asleep angry, and woke up angry still.

Hestia found the diamond ring while she was digging through a drawer looking for toothpaste and she screamed. It was not the good, excited sort of scream she always associated with engagement rings. It was rage and frustration, hoarse and rough in her throat. The sound didn't wake Rabastan, so she chucked the box at his head from the bathroom door.

"I didn't find this," she informed him flatly, all of her effervescent and seemingly endless good humor completely spent.

"I…d'you mean no?" Rabastan's hair was in a snarl on the right side of his head, his face puffy from sleep. He looked utterly dejected.

"I _mean_, there's not a question. I can't answer any question that doesn't exist centered around a ring I didn't find." Hestia's voice grated like a metal rasp.

Rabastan made to sit up. "Do you want to--."

"No, not in the least," Hestia cut him off, whirling back around to the pristine, tiled bathroom to finish getting ready.

She wore the most professional set of robes she had, and her tallest heels. It was going to be a long day at work and they weren't the most comfortable shoes in the world, but, _fuck it_, she was wearing them.

She was going to go home after work and scream at Sturgis and Hestia wanted to be able to look him in the eye while she did.


	7. Chapter 7

_Life in Black and White_

Chapter Seven

* * *

"Quite the warrior princess this morning, Hestia!" Alasdair commented, sadistically cheerful, shuffling some papers as Daniel slunk away from Hestia's desk, cowed by her high-handed, snapping response to a perfectly legitimate question. Hestia didn't deign to respond, holding her spine unnaturally straight, her chin high. "You're doing it right, Abbott, don't pay her mind. She's had her knickers in a twist all day."

"…Thanks, Alasdair," Daniel cast a look between his two fellow interns, seeming to silently rue his desk's position in between.

Hestia leashed her temper, biting the inside of her lip. "I'm sorry, Daniel." There wasn't any elaboration, and she turned back to staring down some of the backlogged arrest paperwork.

Temper had never been much of an issue for Hestia, but then she'd never quarreled with Sturgis before. More oriented to the agreeable, she'd never really gotten into any sort of a mood resembling righteous fury, but that was exactly where she was now. She was angry and, moreover, had a completely justifiable reason for being so. She could map out _exactly _what made her angry and what she had to say about it, could anticipate what Sturgis would invariably snarl back at her at some point, and had counterpoints.

Never before had anger been so soundly logical, so well plotted out and placed. Hestia didn't feel like crying; she felt like arguing.

It felt like the fun kind of work, the moments of perfect, logical _rightness_ that made the slog through the convoluted paperwork somehow worth it. And it felt _good _to know that this was an argument she was more than equipped to win.

Fuck Sturgis, he didn't get to boil her over Rabastan when she'd been so patiently avoiding _his _distasteful (well, presumably) activities.

It seemed like a very long day for Hestia, waiting on the clock, chewing at the bit to get home and let Sturgis know just how big a hypocrite he really was. It was an even longer one for the two other apprentices who shared the office with her.

When five o'clock rolled around, Hestia didn't dawdle. She marched out of the office with a determination that betrayed a little of her excitement. In a complete turnabout from her cautious, hesitant fear of Sturgis and what he had to say to her, she was in her newly acquired garb of Righteous Fury.

Sturgis generally didn't get home from a normal sort of day at the DMLE until around seven, so Hestia made dinner, clattering around her familiar kitchen, the straps of her high heels still buckled firmly around her ankles. The notion of an adult, sit-down discussion of their problems over a nice cottage pie was probably ridiculous, but Hestia intended it as little more than a pretense.

She went to go brush her hair and ended up dawdling around in her beloved and, of late abandoned, bedroom a little too long, and burned the thing, anyway. She conjured a roast chicken pasty and ate that, instead, after she cleaned up the mess.

And then she waited. She didn't want to be caught sitting down, so she stood in her increasingly uncomfortable shoes, pacing the kitchen, leaning on the counter, washing and rewashing the pan she'd burned the cottage pie in.

She'd just eased herself up to sit on the counter (because if he walked in, she still had a position of advantage) when the door swung open and Sturgis' wand pointed in. She was midway through the motion of hopping off the counter and opening her mouth to greet him when he sent a spell at her. Her body seized in midair and she fell, in a full body bind, facedown to the slightly dingy tile floor.

If she could've screamed, she would've. If she'd had any control of her limbs, she could've stopped her fall, or at least managed to cut some of the momentum before her face collided with the floor. If she could've contorted her face into any number of surprised or confused or enraged expressions, she would have. But she was like a statue on the floor, her mind racing with each of these emotions in excess quantity.

The apologies and explanations were out of Sturgis' mouth even as he unbound her. "I'm sorry, Hestia, I didn't think you were here, the wards were down and I thought there was someone…"

The first thing she was aware of regaining control of was her voice. She screamed, a rough, throaty howl of indignation and rage. A half-second later, when her limbs deigned to obey her again, she hauled herself off the floor, struggling and disheveled, the lower half of her face covered in blood from her streaming nose.

Sturgis seemed to have forgotten why he had been so surprised to find her there, and was spouting sincere, horrified apologies as fast as he could draw breath.

"You attacked me in my own damn flat!" Hestia howled, scrabbling for a tea towel to press to her abundantly bleeding nose.

"You left the wards down! I didn't know you'd be here, I thought someone had broken in!" Sturgis replied, anger beginning to creep past the shock. A thought struck him, and the red anger sapped from his face. "Are you coming home? Did you end it?"

"_No,_" Hestia snapped, leaning over the kitchen sink with the blood splattered tea towel.

"Here," Sturgis said roughly, spinning her around where she stood to face him. He snatched another tea towel and was holding it up to her face, gently prodding at her nose. "Stupid bint, I thought you had some sense, that you'd broken up with that good-for-nothing and were coming home…your nose is broken," he added, the exasperation that colored the beginning of the statement fading out, rather bizarrely, into gentle apology.

Hestia's eyes were watering from the pain. "Why do you hate him so much? I don't understand, you never told me!" She looked up at him and realized, irrationally irritated, that even in her highest heels, she couldn't look him level in the eyes.

Sturgis still had her face cradled in his hands, thumbs gently exploring the delicate, blackening tissue around her eyes, and this proximity ensured Hestia couldn't miss the guarded sort of look that fell over his face. "He humiliated you, broke your heart," he said, in a tone of voice that almost subtitled itself 'not the whole truth.'

"No," Hestia corrected, the syllable short and sharp like a whipsnap. "You hated him before that mess, from the moment I introduced you. Now, I _know _you're not secretly in love with me and harboring some far flung fantasy of marriage and babies--" Sturgis guffawed shortly in agreement "—so what the hell is your problem?" Sturgis' eyes darted away and Hestia cursed. "Damn it, Sturgis, you _have no right _to hold Rabastan against me when you can't even tell me why."

His hands finished their examination of her injured face and pulled away. "I have every right!" Sturgis shot back at her. "You were _lying _to me, Hestia!" Hestia wrinkled her nose in distaste and nearly screamed at the pain, choking on the cry in the back of her throat. Sturgis started at her, concern written on his features, and gently took her hand. "I should take you to St. Mungo's—I'm no dab hand at healing spells, best leave your pretty face to someone who knows an hemostasis charm from a hole in the wall."

Hestia jerked her hand out of his, feeling somehow petty at refusing his help. "I was lying? How dare you criticize me for _lying _when you lie to me every day!"

Sturgis looked angry and uneasy. "I don't lie to you, Hestia."

Hestia scoffed, dabbing carefully at the tears running out of her blackened eyes. "If you weren't lying, it's just because I learned not to ask questions I knew you couldn't answer." Protests seemed to be beating at Sturgis' lips, but he kept his mouth shut. "So," she said coolly, taking up her handbag from the kitchen table, "You can get down off your high horse, Sturgis." She headed for the door, broken nose in the air.

"Hestia," Sturgis said, his voice taking a turn for the pleading. "Please! He's dangerous, please don't."

"Don't baby me, Sturgis, I'm a big girl," Hestia said, and shut the door behind her.

* * *

Rabastan, when properly informed where she'd been and with a full survey of Hestia's bruised face, was immediately sure Sturgis had hit her. Hestia laughed grimly at that. Sturgis and Rabastan were two of the last men on earth she would ever expect to haul off and hit her, probably ranked with her dad and Professor Kettleburn (an incident Hestia's second year had, in addition to scarring the sixth-year Care of Magical Creatures class for life, deprived him of his entire left arm and the stubby remnant of his right), but if the situation had been different and she'd come home to Sturgis with her face in a similar condition, he would've blamed Rabastan just as quickly. _Men._

After a suspiciously brief wait at St. Mungo's (Hestia was quietly certain Rabastan had paid someone off to get her name bumped up on the waiting list, but she was too grateful to complain about it) her nose was fixed and they were sent on their way.

Rabastan made her dinner and then left her alone in his townhouse's well-appointed library to study for her fast-approaching examination. Around midnight, though, he ended his self-imposed exile to coax her into bed. "C'mon, Hestia," he wheedled, crouched beside the high-backed leather chair she'd curled into, one of her many law books open on her lap. She smiled at him, bleary-eyed from intense concentration on the tiny text. "C'mon," he said again, leaning his head against her knee, his hands snaking around her calves.

"I need to study," Hestia protested weakly, more of a tease than anything, already dog-earing the page to mark her place.

"Such a workaholic." Rabastan stood up and leaned in to kiss her over the book on her lap. "It's a Friday night!"

"Hey!" Hestia mumbled around his mouth, turning her face away. "I am not a workaholic! I am just in a demanding period in my career. And at least I'm _doing something _with myself!" she concluded pointedly.

Rabastan grinned at her, ducking his face into her neck and not bothering to deny her half-spoken accusation. "I'm more of a recreational worker—you, my darling, are an addict."

Hestia sighed, a little put off. "It's just we're such a mess lately, I've been going in to work not sure if I'm going to be working nonstop or sent home after an hour. And the Selwyn case…" Rabastan froze, just for a moment, and their position was immediately uncomfortable without the playful air that had dissipated.

"You're involved with that case?"

Hestia was immediately seized with an overriding sense of 'oops.' This sort of excess talking seemed exactly the thing Caradoc would consider 'getting into something stupid.' "Er…I'm really not supposed to talk about it."

"But you're involved?" He drew back, and the humor was gone from Rabastan's eyes.

"Peripherally, I suppose," Hestia admitted grudgingly. "Please don't ask me, I'm not supposed to talk about it."

A smile that was perhaps a little too rigid spread across Rabastan's face. "All right, my love, I won't." He kissed her quick on the lips. "I won't say a word if you put down this book right now and come to bed."

Hestia made a show of consideration. "Well, I suppose that seems fair."

* * *

Hestia noticed the mark on Rabastan's arm as they lay there in his bed. She drew her fingers across it and he shivered and pulled away.

"What is that?" she murmured into his chest, reaching out after him. "A tattoo?"

"Yeah," he admitted, the hand that was lazily tracing back and forth on the curve of her hip halting.

"Let me see," she insisted, drawing his arm back. He let her, and seemed steeled for her answer. "Ugh, Rabastan, that's the ugliest thing I've ever seen, what were you thinking?" Hestia made a face in the dark, tracing her fingers over the ugly black tattoo on his forearm. He seemed to relax, and Hestia looked up at him.

"My brother talked me into it, said it would look cool."

"Your brother," Hestia said dryly, and without the faintest trace of affection, "talks you into very stupid things. Can't you get it taken off? It's horrible." There was something about the black skull and snake that seemed vaguely familiar, but she turned her mind away, shivering at the unpleasant image.

"It's a tattoo, Hestia," Rabastan said, a little sharper than she'd heard from him lately. "Of course I can't get it off."

"They can take tattoos off, Rabastan." Hestia narrowed her eyes, rolling off his chest and onto her elbow and tossing her long hair out of her face to look at him.

"Not this one, they can't," he said shortly. "Go to sleep." He tried to guide her back down onto his chest, but Hestia curled away from him, settling down beside instead. He let out a frustrated breath. "Merlin, woman, it's just a tattoo. I'll cover it up if it bothers you that much."

"Fine," Hestia said in a final sort of way, settling down to sleep.

"Fine." They both lay there quietly for a moment.

"I don't want to go to bed angry over my stupid tattoo," Rabastan burst after a minute, sitting up in bed to look over at Hestia. "Like as not I'll wake to find you've hightailed it back to Sturgis."

"You say you don't want to go to bed angry, and then you sit there and pick an entirely _new_ fight with me? Really, Rabastan?" Hestia sat up, too, her anger flaring.

"Oh, like you weren't thinking of it," Rabastan said scathingly, getting out of bed and pulling on his pajama bottoms.

She _had_ been, to her very private shame. But Hestia was a very good Juriswitch in training; she could lie with the best of them, and act indignant at the allegation, too. "I absolutely was not! Is that how it's going to be, then? Every time we argue, you're going to bring up the possibility of me doing a runner? Well, that's a reason to stick around if ever I heard one."

Hestia was burning mad, the kind of angry that didn't bode well for her eloquence. The heat in her face was coalescing into furious, frustrated tears behind her eyes and her reason was deserting her. She burst into tears and jumped out of bed, pulling the sheet with her and making for the toilet. Rabastan caught her halfway, swept her into his arms and muttered apology after apology; Rabastan _hated_ making her cry and the first track down her cheek meant an immediate ceasefire, no matter how riled he'd been. It had always been a quick cheat to end an argument in the pleasantest fashion possible, but right now it just left her feeling hugely unsatisfied.

If she'd been less tired, Hestia might've let the anger that the apologies incited in her slip. She _wasn't _crying because he'd upset her, she was crying because she was angry and if she'd had a little more energy, she would've made certain he knew that. But, so late at night, it was easier to let him coddle her and apologize and show her back to bed, where she fell asleep in his arms, too tired to seethe.

She had a dream where something burned her stomach in the exact place Rabastan's forearm was resting, and he was gone when she woke. He didn't reappear until nearly eleven, as Hestia was readying herself for a Saturday afternoon shift at Madam Malkin's. He swept her up, spinning around and pinning her up against the wall and kissing her ardently. Apparently the anger from last night was forgotten, and that was all right by Hestia. She'd had enough unpleasantness with Sturgis.

"You smell like smoke," Hestia complained, wrinkling her (blissfully unbroken) nose. He grinned at her, already pulling at her work robes. "Where did you go?"

"Can't have that," he said breathlessly, breezing over her question as he paused to shuck his own outer robe before pushing her back. "Shower?"

Hestia batted him away ineffectually. "I already took one! I need to get to work. And I'm going to walk out of here smelling like an old fireplace if you keep this up."

"Work? It's Saturday." Rabastan frowned at her.

"I have a shift at Madam Malkin's." He nearly choked as she moved to duck under his arms. Hestia frowned at him. "You have a problem with a shopgirl girlfriend?" she asked crisply.

Another too-rigid smile crossed his face as he pushed her towards the door. "No, I just have plans for today. We're not leaving this house."

Hestia sighed.. "I'm going to work, Rabastan." She scrunched up her face, falling back into the familiar role as the responsible, reality-grounded one in the relationship. "Let me go."

"No. You are staying here." His voice had taken on a new determination. A determined Rabastan was a dangerous occurrence.

"I have to go into work, Rabastan. I've already said I would," she grated, looking him hard in the eyes with a firmness she didn't quite feel. She was already feeling the first whispering touches of defeat…was there _anything _Rabastan couldn't talk her into, she wondered in annoyance.

"Can't we just spend a day together? You're always working!" Hestia deflated further. "I will lock you in this house if I need to, Hestia, you don't need that job. You're going to work yourself into an early grave—just take a damn day off, please?"

"But…" Hestia frowned, biting her lip against the truth. Trying to convince herself it wasn't at all shameful, she admitted, "Rabastan, I need the money. I'm counting on it to feed myself…I'm barely covering next month's rent as it is." She internally regretted the words. Rent brought up the subject of her flat, and that meandered a little too close to a certain flatmate. "I bought a pair of shoes when I shouldn't've, I need to make up the money."

"I will buy you whatever you want. Food, clothes, shoes, whatever," Rabastan promised, gracefully--perhaps ignorantly--skating over the thin ice in his elation to have discovered a new avenue of persuasion. "You just stay here with me today."

"Doesn't that make me a prostitute? Accepting material gain for sexual favors?" Hestia asked, resigned.

"Nah," Rabastan said lightly, already working the buttons down the front of her robes. "It's nothing you weren't going to do anyway. If it bothers you, think of it as replacement wages for the work I'm detaining you from." At her raised eyebrows, he amended, "Or, you know, a gift from a loving boyfriend?"

"True." Hestia smiled wearily.

"Don't worry about money, Hestia, I'll take care of you," he promised earnestly, and Hestia forced a smile. Of course he would; he'd buy her the world and she wouldn't mind at all but for the fact that it was his _family's _money, and she'd sooner wear rags and walk barefoot than take a gift from _them._ He noticed the set line of her brow and tickled her gently until she smiled, quite against her will. "I've never seen anyone so upset by the thought of a day off! C'mon, come shower." He pulled her hand, and she pulled away.

"No, my hair's all done. _You _shower, I'll go Floo in sick. Deal?" She stuck her hand out.

He shook it solemnly. "Deal!" Rabastan agreed, darting off to the shower. "I promise, it'll be a good day off! You might even want to take one every once in a while!"

She Flooed in, feigning (with not too much effort) exhaustion, and crawled back in bed, shedding the rest of her half-undone clothing and fell asleep almost instantly.

While she slept, Diagon burned.

xXx

* * *

This was a hard chapter to get done. I'm sorry about the wait, I hope it won't take this long again!

Just a note: it is my belief that, in the earlier part of the war, the Dark Mark on the Death Eaters' arms would not be a widely known fact--only quite late in, after they'd arrested a few, would it be obvious that it was an identifying mark. So don't blame Hestia-- Death Eaters are a new and not fully realized concern and the Dark Mark is not yet widely known, and she wouldn't know it marked her boyfriend as a Death Eater. She's just angry because it's ugly!


End file.
